The Rebels

2

THE TOWN DOZES AMONG MOUNTAINS, PRESERVED in cotton wool, its three towers pointing indifferently at the sky. There is electricity and running water in its houses. A train in the station is blowing its whistle. Three mountain peaks surround the town: inside the rock, some copper and a little magnesite. A river rushes through, a brisk mountain stream, the air above it sharp and hard and delivered into the heart of town while, in the opposite direction, the dense forest swarms up the mountainside. The middle peak retains its cap of snow for a considerable time: the locals are proud of the alpine backdrop it so picturesquely provides. A narrow-gauge train carries passengers from the railway station to the main square. The houses too are narrow and long, tending to shoulder up against each other because the town was once a fort and people have lived here for generations. The seminary is yellow: mornings and evenings you can see the monks in their brown robes, their rope cords, and sandals carrying their rosaries as they make their way to church for their devotions. The bishop’s palace has a wide wrought-iron balcony, its spikes complete with baroque ornamentation, the flag-holder above them. The bishop walks out with his secretary every afternoon at three, the secretary’s hard hat glimmering with silk and a tassel dangling behind from the hat’s rim. The bishop makes a point of grandly greeting everyone who greets him. He rises early because he is an old man who sleeps badly; by dawn he is standing at his high desk forming tiny pearl-like letters. Others are measuring out wine in the cellars of the town hall, the wine stone cold. The vaults of the cellars are made of heavy slate: a century ago it was Poles who were drinking the wine here, the smoky marks of their torches still visible on the walls. Damp keg smells, the delicate, dense smell of alcohol and stearin candles. A bread ticket. Closing time. An endless sequence of barely noticed trains passes through town. One rumbles past now: it measures at least two or three hundred meters but the platform guard doesn’t even look up and the trains roll on carrying holidaymakers and the wounded, for here is the resort and here is the station. Some open the doors of their cars for an hour or so and the smell of carbolic and iodine oozes out to an enormous silence. The smell wafts downtown but is particularly acrid near the station. Big buckets of lime wait on the platform, for it sometimes happens that certain passengers have to be carried from the train and need to be sprinkled with it. But this is the fourth year of hostilities and the town has gotten used to it, especially those people whose job it is to sprinkle lime. They are very quiet now. There are no longer attendants in snow-white garments with red crosses on their armbands waiting at the resort station: the lady volunteers of the town are gone along with their shining uniforms that looked as crisp as those worn by wax nurse dolls displayed in the pharmaceutical department of the big store, to be replaced by, at most, two sanitary workers whose uniforms do not shine and are not crisp, and who grunt hey-upp when called upon to act as stretcher bearers. The war is a long way from here. There is only a kind of ash or soot, the kind that is carried from a distant fire and falls some distance from its source. The war will never reach as far as this. There were only telegrams at the beginning, and then the trains that passed through town. An elementary school had to be turned into a hospital as did half the monastery. A number of people were awarded distinctions for their services to the nation. The stationer’s window still displays the maps of Russia and France, but the nimble, plumpish old proprietor no longer nips out each morning to pin tiny flags on them to mark the victories of the Central Powers with his own fair hands; in fact he tends not to put pins anywhere and has lost a little weight for no one pays attention to the maps now. The town has become accustomed to the war. No one talks about it, rushes out for special editions of the local paper, or bothers to pick up the national press at the station. The town has become accustomed to the war in the way one can get used to old age, the thought of death, to anything at all. The roads are a little neglected, a lot of people go about in mourning dress, some familiar faces have disappeared, but you can’t deny that a few sprigs of well-being are blossoming in the ruins. The war is a distant hourglass, sand mixed with human remains, but this morning you could see the treasurer in his gray morning suit and yellow elastic-sided boots in the public gardens, girls who were children only four years ago but are now slender young ladies strolling down the promenade, girls to whom men turn their minds despite the war. It is a small, clean, and colorful town, a toy town in its gift box. There is a lot of litter everywhere now, houses are not repaired, old notices in groceries inform the public that salted fish are expected, but that’s about all. Red, blue, and yellow advertisements on street columns. And, here too, those who are doing well can find opportunities for helping themselves. Every afternoon the town clerk may be seen ambling through Szent János Square with his vizsla hound, heading for the embankment to play fetch. The movie house is pretty popular and the theater is almost always full when they perform operetta. Amadé Volpay is the comic. One day Ábel will be sitting in a big city and will pronounce the words “world war,” but recall only Tibor and Amadé, and a certain anxiety and curiosity. One’s hometown is not merely the church tower or a square with a fountain though, it is flourishing trade and industry, it is the doorway where some thought first crossed your mind, a bench on which you used to sit pondering something incomprehensible, a moment in the shower where you seemed dizzily to remember fragments of an earlier existence, a neatly polished pebble found in an old drawer that you can no longer think why you stored there, the scripture master’s hat, brown with an unbecoming patch, the cold sweat before a history lesson, strange games whose rules no one understood and you were too embarrassed to explain, a lie the consequences of which gave you nightmares for the rest of your life, an object in someone’s hand, a voice you hear at night through an open window and cannot forget, the way a room is lit, two tassels under a pair of curtains. War is not precisely what we tend to think about it. Ábel will not be telling tales about it to his grandchildren as they sit on his knee, because in him too the war awakens memories of fear and anxiety, but the fear is in respect of Tibor and the anxiety is focused on Amadé. The population numbers sixty thousand. There are tennis courts. The town happens to be asleep right now, the mayor has problems with his heart and lies spread-eagled in his bed, his dentures in the glass of water beside him; in musty rooms omnipotent fathers sleep in nightshirts beside their wives. In the woods above town animals are waking. The actor is saying: Sad to say, you don’t know real vodka. The real pure stuff turns everything you see a blue color.

THEY BEGAN STEALING AT THE BEGINNING OF November.

There was a short period, a few weeks in the gang’s existence, when they could amuse themselves perfectly well without money. They would meet at Ábel’s or Tibor’s place. Sometimes they could spend the whole night at Ábel’s, if they kept their heads down until his aunt had dozed off. At that early stage they didn’t need to pay for entertainment. Cash only became an issue afterwards once their experiments and exploits developed more complex requirements. Béla was the first to commit a theft.

It was he who had sought explanations and raised objections, who labored to excuse himself. No one had prevailed on him to steal but once he started making excuses, they spontaneously shouted, indeed howled him down. Béla had stolen thirty crowns from his father’s cashbox in order to buy a pair of brown, handmade, double-soled shoes he had coveted in the display of a recently opened shoe shop. He bought the shoes, brought them over to Tibor’s, tried them on, and walked about in the room for half an hour. He didn’t dare go out into the street wearing them because he was terrified at the thought of meeting his father who would notice the shoes on his feet and might get to asking where they were from.

The way things worked at his father’s big grocery store allowed Béla, once most of the assistants had been drafted and schoolkids had to be engaged to take their place, to remove money inconspicuously from the box, small sums at first, then ever larger ones. Some afternoons, when his father took a nap Béla would slip unnoticed through the gloom of the shop into the glass booth where his father kept cash in the drawer of his desk. The daily intake was substantial enough to allow his theft of ten or twenty crowns to go unremarked.

Béla worked fast. He bought himself a miscellaneous set of clothes. He was rather fastidious. One relative, the district magistrate, had hanged himself from the window catch in the third year of the war because he feared his wife and children would starve to death. His father-in-law’s shop cellars might be stacked with millstone-shaped Swiss cheeses, herring, wheat, potatoes, rice, and sardines but they failed to reassure him and the thought of starving gripped his family’s imagination. Whether at home, at table, or in the shop, Béla, who was able to take his pick of such delicacies even at times of strictest rationing, found little satisfaction in his father’s rich Canaan store. He spent the stolen money in other grocers’ shops, surreptitiously purchasing Baltic herring, Turkish delight, sardines, and anchovies in oil at inflated prices, all goods the traders had bought from his own father.

Béla was as terrified of his father as simple people are of natural disasters. The mere mention of his name left him pale and trembling. In the gang’s imagination Colonel Prockauer was one of the Fates of Ancient Greece, the Fates who could strike out of the blue and wreak universal carnage, leaving behind a flat plain and the smoke of ruins. Béla’s father was not, like him, an act of fate but part of their common, wholly undramatic lot, an ordinary accident. His bony hand would come into contact with his son’s face and administer light but very powerful blows with a cold methodical regularity, the kind delivered by people with heart problems, anxious—for the family’s sake—not to get themselves overexcited. Once he threw a knife at an apprentice boy, a great big blade he used to cut cheese with, that lay on the counter covered in cheese parings.

For a long time it was only Béla who stole. They even took care to ensure that it should be Béla alone who spent the stolen money. He had to consume the food he had bought with it in front of the others without any assistance from the gang. Ernõ sat opposite the thief, his penetrating gaze fixed on him, checking that he ate it all up, his cheeks crammed, his eyes bulging.

He hid the items of clothing he had bought at Tibor’s apartment. He bought other things too: a double-barreled shotgun, a powerful magnifying glass, an enormous papier-mâché globe, a pair of leather leggings with fine straps, a Browning revolver. It was when he bought the bicycle he never dared to ride because he didn’t know how to and because some acquaintance might see him and tell his father that the moment of decision about the hiding place arrived. The purchases were multiplying. Tibor, who was afraid that his father would suddenly turn up, no longer felt up to acting as Béla’s unclaimed luggage office. They had to get rid of the things somehow.

They began by ordering Béla about. Béla grimaced and obeyed. Within two days he was told to buy an entire fire-works display that would be thrown into the river the next evening. Ernõ was the fount of their best ideas, for example the one where Béla had to steal sixty crowns and send a bouquet of flowers to the prior at the monastery. According to the messenger, the reverend father received the gift with considerable astonishment. He blushed in embarrassment, made a clumsy bow, and stood there with the flowers in his hand, covered in confusion.

They did more than play cards at Ábel’s place. They told tales of passion, lying their heads off. The stories had to begin with the words: “This afternoon I was passing the theater when I met a sailor, the captain of a ship.” The town lay thousands of miles from any sea. They had to inquire of the sea captain how he came to be in town and what he was doing here. The extraordinary story that developed out of the meeting with the captain had to be built up, detail by detail, out of facts that could be checked or were thought to be at least credible, complete with witnesses who actually lived in town a few streets away and could testify to the truth of the narrator’s account. The core of the story was pure fantasy but the details had to be simple and clear.

They went around as a foursome. They took up the sidewalk and, at all hours of the day, would be found padding down the narrower streets like a wary military detachment, wholly preoccupied. Ernõ and Ábel took care that their exploits should be interesting and should remain within the bounds of the feasible. They fastidiously rejected certain ideas the group threw up as a whole. After a few weeks Béla too learned the ropes. Tibor, with his refined instincts, had no problems adapting to group existence. If the games and exploits they undertook had any rules, they remained unacknowledged, the only criterion being that they should have no practical use. Ernõ described their activities as self-justifying. Béla stole and bought useless things with the stolen money, clothes he would never wear and items of technical apparatus whose application was beyond his understanding.

They even came up with the idea of having some kind of gang uniform made, something they could wear at home, but they rejected it. Another time they enthusiastically agreed that they should find a tailor out of town and order garments they could never wear because they were too big, or because the trousers or the jacket were hilariously tight, all to be made from the most expensive material that could be found.

One day Ernõ brought them the address of such a tailor.

Each of them looked him up individually. Tibor ordered a tailcoat made of white sail canvas with yellow silk lining. Ernõ chose an enormous checkered suit that would have accommodated several of him, the trouser legs being attached at the ankle by means of elastic bands. Ábel ordered a cutaway coat that reached down to his heels. The one-armed one chose a suit that had no sleeves at all, the jacket smoothly stitched at the shoulders, tight and armless.

Béla decided on a simple riding costume, a scarlet hunting coat, long black trousers. He also procured spurs and a top hat. They spent hours at the tailor anxiously getting themselves measured up, measuring the tails of Ábel’s heel-length jacket to check that it should not be, even a centimeter or two, longer than it needed to be. The tailor thought they were preparing for a carnival.

He delivered the various articles of clothing in one single lot. The day they first tried them on was March 3, 1918, the day of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.

THE NICE THING ABOUT FRIENDSHIP IS THAT IT is unselfish. From time to time they took an inventory of their possessions and divided them up among themselves.

Béla offered the double-barreled shotgun and a pair of spurs to Ernõ with a cordial smile. By way of return Ernõ presented him with three raw leather soles from his father’s shop along with a little china Virgin and Child.

Once the habit of exchanging gifts was established it was impossible for the others to refuse. Ábel started by stealing books from home: the second volume of Sons of a Stony-Hearted Man and The Lives of the Saints. The books were dutifully acknowledged. When Tibor stole the colonel’s horn-handled knife, Ábel, in a rush of enthusiasm, offered his aunt’s fortune to the gang. They discussed the offer with a certain reluctance. The word “fortune” awed them: for them it suggested wads of paper money, books full of savings, and any number of precious stones. Eventually they agreed that Ábel should bring them the fortune one afternoon. They put on their specially made costumes for the occasion, and carefully went through the tin box Ábel had delivered precisely on time, rendering an account of all the out-of-date lottery tickets, pawnbrokers’ bills, and worthless old banknotes in a pocket book, before Ábel surreptitiously returned the box to its usual place.

Everyone contributed to the common store according to his talent. The guiding principle was that the worth of any contribution depended on the peril involved in the object’s removal rather than on its fiscal value. It was reckoned a piece of derring-do to extract an officially stamped book from the school library and to sell the volume to that exploiter of poor students, the secondhand book dealer. This was in fact an exploit full of danger because the punishment for taking a valuable institutional book was expulsion, possibly followed by legal proceedings. Ernõ took responsibility for the mission and carried it out with remarkable success. Allegedly he hypnotized the secondhand-book seller into accepting the sale. The money made from such an exchange had to be “used for the good.” As to what that good was, each had his own opinion: with the money they had put together they bought a little gold chain from the local jeweler but, having bargained long and hard with him, left it on the shelf and never returned for it.

The gang made a decision that the various teachers they had tormented over the years, according to the usual unspoken compact whereby staff and students torment each other mercilessly, were off-limits: staff should now be treated with due care and consideration. They sat in class quietly, folding their arms in rapt attention. Béla would rush from the back of the room to the front in order to assist the staff member with impeccable courtesy. Occasionally they combined to astound one or another teacher with their exhaustive knowledge of the set topic and to encourage order and respect among their fellow students. The class regarded all this with suspicion but that didn’t bother them. They were aware that they were partaking of far higher amusements than these other blockheads who hadn’t got beyond age-old idiotic pranks and the crude taunting of teachers: they could be polite, appear to be infinitely conscientious, and could lull and eventually disarm their suspicious, tortured superiors. This was far more amusing than crude, disruptive jokes. Not long before Christmas the form master felt obliged to deliver a short speech to the class presenting Béla and Tibor as exemplars, greeting them like reformed black sheep.

Béla couldn’t control himself. He bought skeleton keys and rubber gloves he had absolutely no use for, for no better reason than that he had unobstructed access to the ready cashbox in his father’s desk. He no longer knew what to do with the money. The gang stuck stubbornly to its “for its own sake” principles, and the ten or twenty crowns they daily procured were spent on equally useless items. Béla developed a double passion for cosmetics and fashionable clothes. After his fervent pleas they allowed him to order two elegant up-to-the-minute suits, along with a silk shirt, a high-quality necktie, fine deerskin gloves, and lacquered shoes with antelope inlay. He also purchased a soft, pale-colored rabbit-fur hat and a light bamboo cane. Once a week he was permitted to dress up in these at Tibor’s apartment, while the gang passed the items to him, the one-armed one being tireless in his efforts to beautify him. Once Béla stood there, fully dressed at the mirror with the hat on his head, the gloves on his hands, and the cane at his side, they made him walk up and down the room like a mannequin at a salon, while they passed critical comments on his outfit. Once this was over he sat in a chair opposite the mirror, grinding his teeth, gazing and gazing at his reflection. Then he slowly undressed. Tibor took the clothes and carefully locked them away in his wardrobe while Béla donned his inelegant school clothes again, the trousers of which were made from an old pair of his father’s.

As far as the cosmetics were concerned, his addiction had to remain a secret from the rest of the gang. His obsession with such items as pomades, scents, face creams, combs, and fine soap did not meet with their approval. He was not allowed to use the expensive lotion he had bought to treat his spots: the gang seized it, made him strip, and spread the cream that, supposedly, could make all spots and warts disappear in a matter of days, over his buttocks.

Their rebellion regarding the function and use of various objects and matters extended to include some peculiar sacrifices. For example it was regarded as correct and admirable to spend days fretting in the attempt to learn some ten lines of text from a Swedish book, a language no one in the region could speak. Ábel won considerable prestige by parroting such phrases. At the same time it was considered a mortal sin to cram for the next day’s Latin or history class. They did not reject intellectual effort in itself but prized it only when it yielded no practical result. There were equally stringent rules regarding sins of the flesh. Tibor was an outstanding athlete, passionate about the long and high jump, so found it hard to resist leaping over a fallen chair or some other obstacle. They let him indulge the joy of leaping, but only when attempting to leap a distance or height that was clearly beyond his capacities and there remained a good chance that he would bruise himself in the process.

The hoard grew and grew. Everything was shoved into Tibor’s room for the time being. It was only the arrival of the bicycle that rendered the space too narrow. The Prockauers lived in a single-story building, and one could only get into the boy’s room by passing through the room where his sick mother lay. The situation was rendered slightly less problematic by the fact that the windows in his room opened onto the yard, so the heavier and more awkward articles could be passed through the window. The window was also useful as a means of entrance and departure though someone usually had to be posted to engage the mother’s attention. The person most frequently entrusted with that task was Ernõ, who would sit with hands clasped by the woman’s bedside, his hat on his knees, his eyes fixed on the ground, while the traffic continued in and out of Tibor’s window.

It was hardly possible to move now in either Tibor’s or Lajos’s room. The purloined objects covered the table, the top of the cupboard, and the beds. The gang had started competing with one another. Ábel had brought his father’s pliers and pincers, an old camera, and parts of his aunt’s girlhood trousseau whose lilac ribbons and yellowed papyrus colors spoke eloquently of the expectations of an unrequired maidenhead. Out of sheer good manners Tibor attempted to match Ábel’s offering with a complete set of his father’s riding gear. Useful household items began migrating from one home to another, swapping places. This was all just a game for now, a test of skill and courage. Tibor would wake some nights with sweat pouring off him to gaze astounded at the crowded room: he dreamt his father had arrived home unexpectedly and ordered him to account for the bicycle, the canvas tailcoat, the medical pliers and pincers. It was Béla alone who, having stolen money, faced a more pressing danger. It wouldn’t have counted for much that he never spent it.

They decided to seek a proper repository for their loot. Ábel’s aunt, for all her credulity and infinite patience, did nevertheless notice the saddle and full set of equine apparatus in his room. The colonel’s wife started feeling better that fall and talked of rising from her bed. There was no immediate danger since at the beginning of every season Mrs. Prockauer tended to forewarn the world of her imminent emergence, predicting that she would soon be up and walking, but nothing had come of it in all these years. One fall afternoon they hired a cab and drove out to The Peculiar. They dined at the inn. The one-armed one set off to explore the house with the result that he discovered some rooms-to-let in the mezzanine.

The Peculiar was built on a gentle slope, a half hour’s coach ride from town, in the middle of a partially cleared forest. Behind it loomed a dense bristling wall of pines, with the bare crags of the mountain rising to a peak above it, a peak whose glittering cap of snow might make anyone think they were in the Alps. The place had once been a spa, and a few empty neglected buildings, which used to be popular with the local bourgeoisie in the summer at the end of the last century, were ranged round the inn. Ábel had a faint memory of how, a very long time ago, in the early years of his childhood when his mother was still alive, they had vacationed here in August. A bitter, sulfurous water still bubbled from the spring. The long tobacco-smelling dining room of the inn with its pendulous oil-burning chandeliers, the ceiling decorated with old boughs, reminded him of the so-called Anna Balls, named after the ball first given in his daughter’s honor by one János Szentgyörgyi Horváth back in 1825. Along the floor, where it met the walls, dry rot fungus grew in luxuriant forms. When the weather was very hot some summers, groups of picnickers might find their way here. The inn itself was still approached through a mass of tipped-up tables on white gravel in a garden with a few straggling trees, surrounded by rotten stakes that served to support empty tin lantern casings. Glass domes prevented wind blowing the candles out on the tables. The place was sticky with damp and neglect, a neglect that seemed to symbolize the human condition at large.

“No,” said the man, “no one comes here in the fall.”

He was elderly, with a Slavonic accent, and had been struggling to maintain the property that he had acquired decades ago at an auction and was now stuck with. He told them that a few years ago, in peacetime, which they wouldn’t be able to remember, couples from town used to make excursions here. The happy memory of once playing mild Cupid to a generation of genteel lovers flickered across his tired, careworn face. That was when he had fitted out the three guest rooms upstairs. This gay, salacious period came to an end with the outbreak of war. Nowadays, it seemed, couples no longer thought it necessary to avoid the public gaze. The rooms had stood empty for years. There was nothing to stop them installing a couple of iron stoves there. He and his wife spent the whole winter here.

The gang hemmed and hawed. Should they or shouldn’t they, they wondered as they chewed their tasteless salami and Liptauer, sipped at their beers, and silently pondered the idea. The one-armed one stuttered and offered arguments but they ignored him. Ábel was lightly aware of his heart beating. Without having exchanged a word on the subject they felt they had come to a turning point. Taken aback by the idea, Béla spoke with his mouth full, “Well, well, friend…” They were all preoccupied by the thought of a hiding place, regretting they hadn’t discovered one before. Had they done so earlier, having one would have prevented them sneaking about and relieved them of the constant sense of shame. They proceeded silently up the rotting wooden stairs, in single file. Years of unattended rubbish and gloom had gathered in the room. The windows opened onto the pine forest. The beds lay bare, without sheet or blanket, as if glued to the walls that were themselves hung with cobwebs. Mice had clearly been busy at their work of destruction. The tabletop was covered in mouse droppings.

“Wonderful!” cried the one-armed one. “No one could possibly live here now!”

Using his thumb and forefinger he carefully lifted a woman’s comb from the dust on one of the bedside tables. The filthy object suggested something lascivious, the lost illusions of a long-forgotten affair. They examined it, bright-eyed. The notion that no one could live here now allowed them to consider the room as their own.

It was Béla who struck the deal for two rooms. The following week they made the most thoroughgoing preparations for the move. The proprietor thought the young gentlemen were after a location for various discreet rendezvous. By the end of the first week he had to admit he was disappointed in that hope. There were daily deliveries, the arrival of the bicycle signaling the end of all the comings and goings. Every day it was a different young man with a knapsack full of peculiar hard-to-explain items. Had he not known that he was dealing with students he might have felt rather uneasy. But seeing it was the son of Colonel Prockauer and his school friends what was there to worry about? Each arrival vanished into one of the rooms, locked the door, and spent a long time in there fiddling with things. After they had gone the proprietor would carefully creep in and take a look, but a few strange items of dress, the great globe, and those harmless books suggested no cause for alarm.

The gang relaxed its ideals regarding uselessness. The knowledge that they had their own, and to a large degree independent, hiding place, a space they could do what they liked with, a room they could safely lock, slowly intoxicated even the most sober of them. They spent entire afternoons in their foul-smelling lair by the sweating iron stove, swimming in demonic cigarette smoke, arguing, making up pointless games, and refining their rules. This was the time of proper games. It was a second childhood, guiltier than the first but less restrained, more exciting, more sweet.

They would arrive as soon as they could in the winter afternoon, immediately after lunch. The bicycle was used by whosever turn it was to arrive first and light the stove. By this time they had supplies of tea, rum, brandy, and tobacco. The smell of rum saturated the walls of the airless room, and according to Ábel anyone who came in would think he was in a ship’s cabin. All cabins smelled of rum, Ábel insisted. The saddle lay on the bed, with the hunting rifle next to it, and a visitor was more likely to think that he had entered the lair of a criminal on the run, and that the fugitive occupant was resting his exhausted limbs somewhere while his hard-driven horse was ambling about in the snow. The hideaway served all their purposes. It offered a shelter unknown to fathers, teachers, and the powers-that-be. It was somewhere real life could finally begin. That life resembled nothing they had hitherto known. It wasn’t like their fathers’ lives, lives that did not appeal to them in the least. Here they could discuss whatever remained unfinished or unexplored. Here the discipline that governed every aspect of their childhood lives could no longer threaten or haunt them.

They had long ago stopped being children, but here, in this room, they discovered that they dared to do what would have shamed them in town, even in front of each other, that, somewhat shyly, they could continue playing at childhood, indulging a part of themselves that could never properly be developed in childhood, a part they still retained. It was only from this vantage point that they could clearly see the adult world as it was and discuss their experiences of it. The one-armed one entered this game with real passion. His nervous stuttering laughter grew more relaxed here. This bolt-hole in The Peculiar was the only place where, occasionally, even Ernõ could be seen laughing.

THIS WAS WHERE THEY GOT TO KNOW EACH other. The secret and secure comradeship that had separated them from the rest of town gave them an opportunity to explore each other’s characters in ways they hadn’t tried before. Everyone had to tell “everything that had happened.” It was self-evidently the case that this “everything that had happened” referred only to the time they had spent under the watchful eyes of their parents. It slowly became clear to them that it was no coincidence that had brought them together like this.

They arranged “afternoons of fear.” Everyone had to reveal what it was they had been most afraid of “in the early days.” In this way they discovered that each of them had something they had not hitherto shared. These “fears” were located in the misty past, at some uncertain distance in time. One such afternoon when it had grown dark and they were squatting in a circle round the dying stove, the one-armed one said the time when he was most afraid was not in the flickering light of the field hospital, on the operating table, but when, at the age of seven, through the glass door of the verandah, he saw his father looming over his mother, the pair of them wrestling, until his mother used both her hands to push his face away and ran off into her room. He had felt so scared at that moment he thought he was going to die. As soon as he had said this he started stuttering again and had a spell of nervous hiccups. In the meantime Béla, who was sitting in the window watching the light reflected off the snow, tried to collect his own feelings.

“Being afraid is good,” he said.

It was a painful process trying to explain what he understood by the “pleasure” of fear. Tentatively, over several weeks, he had tried to analyze the roots of his own fear while the others were looking for ways to communicate with each other. Once he discovered that he could not get beyond a certain embarrassing point in his life, he stopped in shock and fell silent. Ábel and Ernõ subjected him to a strict cross-examination.

“I am ashamed of it,” he confessed in pain.

He was given two days to collect himself. It was strange that he who had been so excitably lewd and foul-mouthed so far had now to defend his peculiar modesty. The gang was all the more surprised by this sudden shyness regarding his memory, especially since, as it turned out after extended interrogation, there was nothing salacious in it. It was more comical than anything but it was only after a prolonged period of agonizing that he could bring himself to tell them.

We were living on the ground floor then, he started, perspiring and red in the face. Turn your faces away!

It was as if that had been the most trying part of the narrative, for now he spoke in a fever, rapidly, telling them how the end of the ground-floor passage opened onto the neighbor’s garden. Béla had been a timid child with a strict upbringing who even at the age of six would be so alarmed by harsh words that he wet his pants. Whenever this happened he would dry his trousers but would bundle up his underwear and throw the incriminating evidence into the neighbor’s garden. He had disposed of eight pairs of underpants that way. The expectation that his deeds would be discovered and that he would be humiliated and punished brought him to such a pitch of anxiety that he would suffer even more such childhood accidents. And once he actually was discovered and his father had given him a sound thrashing, he felt such a wave of relief flooding through him, such a sense of happiness and well-being, as he had never felt before.

Please understand, he croaked out as quickly as he could, that being afraid was a pleasure. I had calculated what my punishment would be and anticipated it. I learned to calculate it over a period. I knew what it was that would get me a box on the ear, what resulted in a beating, what in being made to go hungry: all that was calculable. It was dreadful living in anticipation of what was to come, but once it came it felt good.

ERNÕ SPOKE UP EVENTUALLY.

You know my father, he said. It took him a long time to become the buffoon he is now. He even learned to read late, only once he had grown up. He read just two books, the Bible and a cheap old eighteenth-century reference work, The Little Threefold Mirror, that everyone knew. I’m not ashamed of him, but then you know nothing about our relationship. He’s right when he talks about the division of wealth. Wealth does not consist of having money. It’s something quite different. I shall never possess it, while you—every one of you—has had it from the moment you were born.

My first real knowledge of fear was when one day my father stood in front of the mirror. I can have been hardly more than a toddler. I was sitting in a corner of the workshop on a low stool. We had a lame crow that my father had brought home. We had its wings clipped and it lived with us. I was sitting on the stool, playing with the crow. My father was working away in the room. At that time he had no beard, nor did he hobble. Suddenly he stopped, stood up, and as if I were not there at all went over to the chest of drawers, lifted the mirror off the wall, brought it over to the table, and looked at himself. I stared at him, speechless, nursing the crow in my lap. My father grasped his nose between finger and thumb and pulled it upwards. Then he bared his teeth. He began to swivel his eyes and twist his mouth and pull faces the like of which I had never seen. He carried on doing this for a long time, completely absorbed in it. My mouth gaped wide open as I stared. At first I felt like laughing, but I quickly realized it was nothing to laugh about. My father’s expressions when he swiveled his eyes and twisted his lips were so strange that I began to be afraid. He took a step backward as if preparing to burst into laughter and opened his mouth monstrously wide. He knotted his eyebrows and snarled furiously. Then he began to weep. Suddenly he leapt towards me as if only just noticing my presence. I screamed out, in fear that he wanted to kill me. He leaned over me, his face deformed in a way I had never seen a face before, nor since for that matter. With one hand he grabbed the crow, squeezed the creature’s neck, then threw it in front of me on the floor. Having done so he rushed out.

The crow lay before me lifeless. I had been playing with it for about a year. I picked it up and, since its body was still warm, began to rock and nurse it. That is how I was discovered by my mother, though I never told her what had happened. I think I must have felt that it was not to do with her. My father didn’t come home that night. When he returned the next morning he brought a box into which he placed the crow, took my hand as if nothing had happened, and led me out into the yard.

Here we buried the crow. My father lavished such care on digging the grave and talked to me so cheerfully as he did so that I couldn’t understand what he had been so furious about the day before and why he had to strangle the crow. But ever since then, when I’m left alone in a room with a mirror, I feel afraid in case I too should stand in front of it and start pulling faces.

THE WHITE TAILCOAT FITTED TIBOR SO SNUGLY he looked quite a man of the world. They did dress up sometimes. Béla sprawled in a chair wearing his red tailcoat, a top hat on his head, his gloves in his hand. The pettiest things made adequate toys for them in this mood. They could amuse themselves with an idea suggested by an object or the whim of a moment as long and as intensely as a child can play with a simple bell. Now each of them discovered an aptitude for acting.

The one-armed one became a passionate producer. He gave them their tasks in a few words and immediately set up the scene. They played out scenes in court, in close family circles, in recruitment offices, at teachers’ conferences, on the bridges of sinking ships. Every child is a gifted actor. They clung to this forgotten talent, their one recompense for the world they were losing. This world glowed faintly behind the familiar world. Ábel believed that he could recall some episodes and sentences from it.

When they stood facing each other like this in the room, in costume, far from town, with the key turned behind them, in the acrid smoke of stove and tobacco, by the light of two flickering candles, among their stash of stolen things, joined like this in a compact whose rationale they never fully understood, only felt instinctively, there were times, between two sentences of some game, when they fell silent and stared at each other for a while as if there ought to be some explanation for their being together, for the game, for their lives. After one of these shocks to the system that was inevitably succeeded by an interval of wry, ironic dawdling, Ábel suggested that they should play a game of Raid. Ernõ and the one-armed one left the room and the three remaining put on their fancy clothes and adopted poses of leisurely relaxation such as might be assumed by anyone in a secure hiding place. Ernõ gave the door a loud knock. Their task was to explain, employing whatever outlandish vocabulary was available to them, why they were together like this and what they were doing here. Ernõ and the one-armed one represented the forces of the outside world. They had no particular office. They could have been teachers, detectives, a military police patrol, or simply fathers who had sought out their “underlings”—that was the expression Ábel insisted on using—to get them to account for themselves.

Ernõ asked the questions. The one-armed one stood at attention behind him like a member of the domestic staff behind the headmaster, a common foot soldier behind a general, or like a less powerful adult—a nasty uncle, say—behind a father. Ernõ wore a hat and Béla swung his bamboo cane and held his deerskin gloves in his hand as they both walked up and down the room. Every so often he removed his pince-nez and held it before him between finger and thumb to clean it. He had come to a conclusion, he announced, and having discovered them in flagrante, established that they, the pupils, had for some time now been breaking the rules and had without permission of their parents, teachers, their betters, and of civil and military authorities generally, consciously decamped from town so that they might lock themselves away in one room of an inn set in a far from reputable bathing place, where they indulged in smoking and drinking alcoholic drinks and remained there for hours at a time. The sight that greeted the entering authorities was certainly strange.

“Prockauer, stand up. Putting aside the question of your progress, which is regrettably slow, I must admit your recent behavior in school has given no particular cause for complaint. I am sorry to note however that the evidence I see around me constitutes a breach of the rules. What is this? Rum. And that? Grape cider. This box? Rollmop herrings! And what do I see here, Ruzsák? Stand up. Would I be mistaken in assuming that those coffee beans have been purloined from your father’s grocery?”

Béla stood up, fiddling absentmindedly with his gloves.

“Wrong. I only stole money from the shop. I bought the coffee elsewhere with the stolen money.”

So they went on from item to item. Ernõ’s interrogation was thorough and formally impeccable. No one denied anything. They were all prepared to admit the provenance of every object. Lajos exchanged indignant looks with Ernõ. Ernõ’s cross-questioning proceeded slowly, with the sharpest questions addressed primarily to Ábel and Béla.

“Not a word, Prockauer. I shall have particular things to say to you. What is the meaning of this clown costume? Is this how you prepare for exams? How you prepare for life while your fathers are fighting at the front?”

“Excuse me!” Ábel exclaimed. “We are not preparing for life.”

Ernõ placed two candlesticks on the table and politely invited the one-armed one to take a seat.

“What is this nonsense?” he asked. “What else can you be preparing for if not for life?”

“We are not preparing at all, headmaster sir,” Ábel replied calmly. “That is precisely the point. We have taken particular care not to prepare. Life can prepare for whatever it likes. What we are concerned with is something quite different.”

“Utterly different,” Béla nodded.

“Hold your tongue, Ruzsák. You bought coffee beans with stolen money, and therefore have nothing to say. What are you boys up to?”

“What we are trying to do,” answered Ábel in his best school voice, “is to nurture comradeship. We are a gang, if you please. We have nothing to do with what other people get up to. We are not responsible for them.”

“There’s something in that,” agreed the one-armed one.

“But you yourself are responsible,” Ábel retorted. “You agreed to serve and have your arm cut off. People have died on your account. People have died because of Ernõ’s father too. In my humble opinion anyone who takes part in this is responsible for what happens.”

“You lot will shortly be called up,” said Ernõ coldly. “Do you think you will be talking like this then?”

“Naturally not. We won’t be talking then, we will all be responsible, but until then I feel no obligation to acknowledge the rules of their world. Nor those of the music lessons I am currently missing because of a faked parental note, nor those that say it is forbidden to urinate against the walls of the theater in public. Nor those of the world war. That is why we are here.”

“I understand,” said Ernõ. “And what are you doing here?”

They kept silent. Béla examined his nails. Tibor rolled a cigarette.

“Here we are none of their business,” said Ábel. “Don’t you understand yet? I hate what they teach us. I don’t believe what they believe. I don’t respect what they respect. I was always alone with my aunt. I don’t know what will happen now. But I don’t want to live with them, I don’t even want to eat their food. That’s why I’m here. Because here I can thumb my nose at their rules.”

“They? Who are they?” asked Ernõ.

They all began to shout at once.

“The locksmiths for a start!”

“The lawyers!”

“Teacher, baker, what’s the difference?”

“All of them! All of them!”

They kept shouting whatever came into their heads. Béla was bellowing fit to burst. Ábel stood on the bed.

“I tell you we have to escape,” he cried. “On bicycle, on horseback. Now! Through the woods!”

“You can’t cycle through woods,” Tibor remarked like a true sportsman.

They felt they were making progress. Now perhaps they were getting to the heart of the secret. Ábel was shouting himself hoarse.

“Your father is a great idiot!” he bellowed and pointed accusingly at Ernõ. “What have I done? Nothing. My aunt kept sending me into the garden to play because the apartment was damp. So I played there. Your father goes on about the rich. That’s not it: there’s another enemy far more dangerous. It doesn’t matter whether one is rich or poor.”

He made a funnel with his hands and whispered through it. “It’s all of them,” he said, his face pale.

“We will become adults too,” said Ernõ solemnly.

“Maybe. But until then I shall defend myself. That’s all.”

Eventually they collapsed on the bed. Ábel’s face was burning. Tibor sat down beside him.

“Do you really think it’s possible to defend ourselves against them?” asked Tibor in a low voice, his eyes wide.

IT WAS SPRING AND VISITORS HAD STARTED CALLING at The Peculiar. The gang became more circumspect in their gatherings. Once or twice a week they managed to get away there in the afternoon but only on Sunday for a whole day. Occasionally they discovered people picnicking in the garden.

So far everything that had happened was entirely between themselves and they felt no guilt about it. They had nothing to do with the mechanisms, rules, and policing of that other world. The “other world”’s significance lay as much in not being allowed to smoke in the street as in the world war. The insults the world showered on them roused them to a similar degree of fury: it was the same whether it was being unable to get bread without ration tickets, the unfair marks awarded by the Latin teacher, someone in the family being killed in action, or being prevented from frequenting the theater without express school permission. They felt that the system that worked against them and dragged them back acted as perniciously in insignificant matters as in great affairs of state. It was hard to say what hurt most: having to offer obsequious greetings to adults they met on the street or the thought of having, in all probability, to salute some sergeant major a few months later.

It was this spring that they lost all sense of proportion. It was not exactly that their games had turned more solemn. Lajos would go off by himself on long walks while they kept a wary eye on him. In certain respects they regarded Lajos as an adult. He was free to do what he wanted and, just as he excused himself from adult ranks as and when he chose, so he might, at any moment, choose to rejoin the enemy. He started wearing his army uniform again and spent the day hanging around with the actor. It seemed he had grown bored of meetings at The Peculiar. He was back in the café. The gang even discussed barring him but then the one-armed one turned up and just at the beginning of the season introduced the gang to the actor.

The introductions took place in Tibor’s room. The actor immediately won their confidence when, out of sheer good manners, he climbed in through the window.

Tibor was the center of the group. Everything revolved around him: they had come together to please him. It was to him they brought their sacrifices and offerings. When the gang abandoned the “for its own sake” principle, there slowly developed a kind of material competition for Tibor’s favors. Ábel wrote poems addressed to him. Béla would bring him presents. Ernõ carried his books, polished his shoes, and undertook all kinds of servant-and-porter tasks for him. Tibor, who had always been courteous, remained remarkably generous and courteous as the object of all this warmth and furious competition.

The younger son of Colonel Prockauer, apart from a passing phase of acne, was, for the gang, that mysterious being, the epitome of all physical perfection. The reputation of Prockauer Junior was much the same in town: so beautiful, so charming. Despite the various boyish accomplishments of running, swimming, riding, leaping, and excelling at tennis Tibor presented a somewhat soft, almost effeminate appearance. His very pale skin and the curiously wavy blond hair that kept falling over his brow covering his blue-gray eyes confirmed the impression. He had inherited his father’s raw fleshy lips as well as the strong oval hands with their short fingers. But the lines of his nose and brow were delicate and mild and the fascinating discrepancy between the upper and lower regions of his face made for a certain uneasiness. His face lacked the normal adolescent’s state of grotesque half-preparedness. It was as if the development of what was boyish in him had been suspended at a particularly fortunate moment in childhood, as if the sculptor had got so far, taken his hand away, and declared with satisfaction: let it remain as it is. Even at thirty Tibor would still look like a boy.

In every movement, in each appearance, whenever he laughed or spoke to somebody, whenever he thanked another with a smile, a characteristic rhythm or pace made itself felt, a light and almost shy courtesy. Unlike Béla and Ernõ, or his contemporaries generally, he seemed to utter foul language with a kind of reluctance, as if he had first to overcome some better part of himself. His profanities appeared to be a form of good manners, an aspect of his courtesy to the others whom he did not wish to shame by remaining silent while they swore.

He did not say much. Something about his being, the way he looked, suggested astonishment. Whenever Ábel or Ernõ were speaking he had the knack of moving in close and with wide-open eyes paying them the utmost attention, then asking the simplest and most admiring of questions, always acknowledging the answer with a graceful smile. It was hard to tell whether the consideration that he radiated had been intensely cultivated or was the result of an entirely unselfconscious curiosity. Books frightened him whenever Ábel wanted to share his own enthusiasm for what he happened to be reading, and it was always with the utmost nervousness that he took a book in his hands, as if it were a highly complex, slightly mysterious object not altogether pleasant to the touch and he would only touch it in order to please his friend.

He lived with them, among them, and took no sides. He exhibited the patience of a good-hearted, high-born gentleman of leisure moving among impatient but decent courtiers, with the foggy sense that his place in relation to theirs was permanently fixed by his birth and destiny. He had a vague feeling that the gang was some inevitable part of that destiny, and as with all matters of fate the fact seemed to him both painful and ridiculous. These boys, from whom he was separated for only a few hours at a time when they were sleeping, to whom he felt bound by a power whose meaning and purpose lay beyond him, that was stronger than any other human bond, were not even particularly sympathetic to him. He wasn’t really attracted to their form of rebellion: they seemed to have chosen it by some act of incomprehensible, intangible aggression. The environment in which they lived, the disorderly order, the unknown, unbearable, disintegrating world outside had also brought him close to a state of internal rebellion, but it was a simpler, more tangible, more violent form of revolution that appealed to him. He felt fully part of everything they did: he couldn’t resist the tantalizing spell it cast with its peculiar means of protest and negation and the way it permeated all their games, a spell whose power emanated from Ábel or possibly Ernõ. His tastes though ran to less complex forms of resistance. For instance, Tibor would never have argued against a scheme whereby they set up a machine gun in front of the church and fought a battle of self-defense, and if one of them were to suggest that they should set fire to the town one windy night it would only have been the practical details that gave him food for thought.

The boys—this gang—in whose midst he suddenly happened to find himself, who seemed to have materialized around him, were not entirely what he would have chosen. He never dared confess this to anyone. He was ready to sacrifice his life to the gang because the gang would have sacrificed theirs for him. The military ethos of his father had somehow percolated through to him and exerted a certain influence. All for one and one for all. That “one” was Tibor.

He observed other groups, other gangs, with a kind of embarrassed longing, admiring the pranks of his schoolmates who, despite the yoke the world imposed on them, seemed to bear their lot lightly with wild practical jokes, fiercely competitive sports, and, above all, by giving themselves to the cult of the body. Tibor admired nothing so much as physical courage. The gang, however, violently rejected such acts of physical bravado along with all other forms of bravado that had any practical application as an entirely alien mode of being.

He couldn’t understand why he was with them. He couldn’t—he didn’t wish to—dissociate himself from them but he continued to feel that he was a guest in whose honor they had gathered together. Everything they did filled him with a sour and vengeful delight. What is to become of all this, he thought and curled his lip. But he was incapable of disengagement. He sensed that there was a latent meaning in their games, that behind the games there glimmered a world he too remembered, a fresh, just, inexpressibly exciting world out of whose splinters the gang wanted to construct something, a small bell jar under a vast sky, within which they might hide themselves and stare at the world outside through the glass, their faces bitterly contorted.

He was the only one among them who didn’t care whether the jar cracked or not, whether he would be drafted. Fear of the war? Could it be worse than the funk before exams, the humiliating concealments, the servile subterranean life they were condemned to live as things stood? War, in all likelihood, was just another form of servitude and humiliation invented by adults to torture one another and people weaker than themselves.

But he remained part of the gang because he felt that association with it protected him from the one overriding yet incomprehensible power, that of adults. Nor had he ever tested the strength of the ties that bound him to the others. They, who acted under no orders and lived in a constant state of rebellion against all sources of power, came to him gently and trusted their fates to him. Perhaps it was pity that he felt as he moved among them, pity and a touch of forgiveness and goodwill. They asked little of him—a smile, a minimal gesture of the hand, or simply his presence among them—and they would have suffered keenly if he refused them.

AND IT WAS ONLY IN THIS ROOM AT THE PECULIAR, solely in these past few months, that he showed an occasional, faint partiality for Ábel. They were bound, barely discernibly bound, by particular hatreds they had in common, more closely bound than the other half of the gang by class, by a vague similarity between the shapes their memories assumed, their upbringing and way of life. There was something they shared that was peculiar only to them, maybe no more than that they had both been beaten as children for matters such as not holding a knife and fork in the proper manner, or for not greeting somebody properly, or for not responding properly to someone else’s greeting. Ábel was skinny, freckled, and pale ginger—there was something about his physical being, particularly about his hands, that engendered in Tibor a certain sympathy he did not feel for the others. Maybe it came down to what Ernõ had said, that wealth was not a matter of money but something else.

The sense of guilt shared by the two of them that—unlike the other two who were perhaps closer to the realities of life—they had something private going on, an advantage of a rather worthless sort but one that could not be made up, not in this life at least, by the others, established a bond between the two within the terms of the bond between the gang as a whole.

The itinerant career of Colonel Prockauer had seen him stationed in various melancholy towns, and somewhere in the recesses of his mind Tibor carried childhood memories of a range of barracks and garrisons. Lajos, the one-armed one, was rather like his father in many respects: pleasure-seeking, greedy, and violent. Tibor was sometimes astonished to note that the one-armed one, whose own childhood, like his, was restricted and spent in barrack squares, under the terrifying rule of his father, was just as drawn to the gang as he was, drawn by a longing for that irreplaceable lost “other world.” Tibor was astonished that Lajos, who had returned from the adult world with partial paralysis and with only one arm, having only a few months before set out from their shared room and a school bench, should have voluntarily re-entered their company, as one among other suffering victims wearing the ball and chain of fate. There was a nervous humility about Lajos’s manner when in the gang’s company, a humility sometimes broken by an ungovernable rush of fury.

He wanted to share in their anxieties and sometimes he too smoked in secret. He was happy to walk down narrow side streets at night in their company and, heart racing, would steal into desolate bars at the edge of town with them. He, to whom everything that one’s parents had forbidden was allowed, who was free of that complex hierarchy of superiors in which parents’ friends played as threatening a role as did teachers or military patrols, now humbly volunteered once more to share with them a fate that no longer bound him.

Some sense of incompleteness emanated from the one-armed one ever since he had returned from the front. He never talked about the front in detail or directly. Ernõ told the gang that the one-armed one was paying frequent visits to the cobbler. They would apparently talk in low voices for hours at a time. When confronted with this Lajos stuttered and tried to avoid answering by going off somewhere. The gang kept a dubious eye on these examples of backsliding whereby Lajos kept seeking out the company of adults. Lajos oscillated anxiously between the world of the gang and that of the adults. It was as if he were seeking something, an answer, some missing item he had utterly lost track of.

Béla suggested he was looking for his other arm. They waved away this ridiculous idea so Béla felt ashamed and fell silent. Surely he can’t be looking for his missing arm because he knows where that is: first it was stored in a bucket, then thrown into the lime pit. People don’t search so feverishly for trifles, Ernõ declared in a superior manner. Ábel proposed that Lajos was looking for his place in society. He couldn’t bring himself to believe that the things he so much desired—freedom and the rights and privileges of being an adult—were worth less than the gang’s form of comradeship. He was seeking something he might have missed before, something adults could not give back to him.

They spoke of adults in general rather than in particular. The word “they” was self-explanatory: it was obvious who “they” signified. They spied on them, described each other’s experiences of them, discussed possible developments. When Mr. Zádor, the bishop’s secretary, who never went anywhere without his top hat, tripped and fell into a puddle in the street it was as much a victory for them as when Judge Kikinday had a toothache and couldn’t sleep for nights on end. They made no distinctions and forgave nothing. They agreed on the principle that in a state of war any means might be employed to destroy the enemy. They never doubted, not for an instant, that the war they were fighting was quite distinct from the ones in which the adults were engaged.

Lajos was their spy. He could work behind enemy lines and render a reliable account. There were very few opportunities for a more effective assault: the enemy was armed, suspicious, and ruthless. His enormous claws were already extended towards them and would pretty soon drag them away.

THE ACTOR WAS FROM THE ENEMY CAMP BUT HE did enter theirs through the window. He was an adult: he had a belly, his shaven face had a bluish tinge, he wore a watch on a chain, strange clothes, and a wig. Lajos brought him along after long negotiations and they received him in the same suspicious manner as they would an enemy.

Immediately, within the first hour, he suggested they employ the familiar tutoyer mode of address. This put them on their guard. The actor sat, walked, chattered, and held forth. He seemed to have a vast amount to say. He smoked their cigarettes, talked of other towns, and told smutty jokes. He discoursed on the life of the theater, and on the doings of the female members of the company, supplying names and specific details. One had to take proper note of these details as they offered insights into what the enemy might have up its sleeve.

The actor was an object of suspicion in every respect. He used terms like sea, Barcelona, steerage, Berlin, underground train, three hundred francs. The actor would say, “Then the captain came down and the blacks all leapt overboard.” All this was highly suspect. He sounded just like the sea captain they knew whom they tended to meet most afternoons in front of the theater. The actor said, “By that time I hadn’t slept for three nights and my baggage had been left in Jeumont so I was overcome by drowsiness. Suddenly the train stops, I look up, and it says, Cologne! Well, I think, Cologne. We shall have to think of something really clever now.” You could listen to stuff like this for hours. But all the time the suspicion grew that reality lay elsewhere, that this was merely the actor’s reality. It ran counter to their practice to place their pooled trust in anyone. They had learned to sense it in their pulses: when others attempted to communicate with them it was either to punish or to plead, but whatever the case it was always with an ulterior motive. It was also difficult to believe that the actor, who could after all have been sitting in the window of the coffeehouse or strolling up and down the high street with his top hat and long-stemmed pipe, possibly enjoying the attentions of chorus girls and divas, should have chosen to spend time with them arguing for hours on end without some particular aim in view.

They never mentioned The Peculiar in front of the actor. He had had to climb through the window as they could not have met openly in public. They couldn’t stroll down the street with him in public either. To have been seen walking with the actor would immediately have brought the wrath of teachers and relatives down on them. The actor was aware of this and sensitively adapted himself to the demands of the situation, lurking with them in a befitting manner.

He was equally nice to them all. He delivered his humorous anecdotes with a serious expression and furrowed brows. Listening to the actor you could come away with the impression that life consisted of a series of extraordinary events that began tragically but inevitably ended up as comedy. “The little blackies,” the actor would say. Once he talked of how “the little tower thingamabob at Pisa” didn’t in fact lean as much as people said it did. Everything was addressed in baby talk: in his mouth, which was forever chewing on a dumpling, the mighty universe itself became “our little cosmikins.” You just had to get used to it.

As you also had to get used to the idea that he wanted to spend his time chatting to them in the first place when it was impossible to work out his game or to discover what made him tick. He’d sit on a chair in the center of the room in his checkered suit, his chin shaved to a brilliant high gloss, his wig stuck to his scalp as though fixed there by resin, his lilac handkerchief billowing from his cigar pocket, his legs crossed with lacquered shoes glimmering on his feet and his bright, slightly myopic eyes running all over them like some tiny insect while he discoursed on the affairs of the world in a thin frail voice. Clearly, it was only distant affairs that interested him.

One day Ábel said: “Watch him. Whenever he says something particularly good he stares straight ahead with a sad look on his face.”

At such times every feature of the pale-blue shaven face relaxed and drooped; his nose seemed to lengthen in melancholy fashion, his thick fleshy lips pouted, and his eyes disappeared under half-closed lids. His nimble, plump white fingers flopped exhausted into his lap. He’d sit there, alone, always precisely at the center of the room. If there happened to be a table there he pushed it aside, drew up a chair, and settled on it, deliberately, exactly in the middle.

You also had to get used to his various fragrances. You had to get used to his constantly chewing licorice. Sometimes, on particularly melancholy days, his scent was quite nauseating. Normally he used a cinnamon essence, but when he felt very low he would splash the stuff on wildly, mixing musk, lilac, chypre, and rosewater, and walk round as if in a trance with clouds of perfume billowing about him, every so often raising his specially perfumed necktie to his nose to take a deep sniff.

There was a curious inner suppleness about his large, ponderous, and melancholy body. When he stood up he would give a little spin as though performing a pirouette. When he gave a bow he stood on tiptoe, one hand to his lips, his arm carving a wide arc before being allowed grandly to drop. As soon as he’d done so he would add: “This is how the strolling players would do it.” And his eyes would be sad as if this were a fact that simply could not be helped.

He explained each and every movement he made. He could talk for hours about why he did this or that or what he did not like. “I loathe it,” he’d shudder. And “I adore it!” He was not much given to the middle way. But when he found himself making too frequent use of the two expressions, he would hesitate and exclaim: “How crude this all is! Quite hysterical, don’t you think? I loathe! I adore! Only women and comedy actors talk like this.”

He had a particularly low opinion of women and comedy actors. He would employ the same disparaging collective tone for them both. Every time he mentioned his fellow professionals his face twisted with fury and pain. He would weep and complain when talking about the rehearsals that took up his mornings. But in the midst of his griping, suddenly it was as if he had given himself a slap: he’d stand up, shrug, and declare: “So what? When it comes down to it I am just a strolling player.”

But his manner suggested that it was only when it came down to it really, in the very last analysis, that he was a mere strolling player.

A couple of weeks after he had made their acquaintance he invited them to his apartment.

The actor lived in a sublet, on the second floor of a tenement block in a wide side street, his windows opening onto a big, dirty courtyard. All the furniture in his room was pressed up against the wall thereby increasing the illusion of spaciousness. A broad carpet covered the floor in the middle and the entrance hall between the two windows offered the visitor his own reflection in a tall standing mirror.

A widow rented the room out, a young military widow who was struggling to bring up her child in the demanding conditions of the time. When the mother went out the actor would give her little rickets-stricken girl ballet lessons, teaching her the elements.

“There are people,” he said, “who look to buy freak children, children whose bodies, like those of animals, are partly covered in fur. Children with two heads. I knew someone like that. He had heard of a little girl who was half covered in fur whose mother was unwilling to sell her, and of a boy with three hands. He kept a record of them. Occasionally he would get on a train and visit them, observe their development, and correspond with the parents. Then he’d sell them on to a freak show. He made a fortune.”

The gang felt an undeniable excitement when they called to see him. They wouldn’t have been surprised to find a colony of seals ranged round his bed when they entered. He received them in a black suit with a flower in his buttonhole. He greeted them with the utmost courtesy and showed them to their seats with a worldly grandeur, offering one the bed, one the chair by the basin, one the windowsill. He was an aristocrat arranging a soirée. He himself, as was his wont, drew a chair into the middle of the room and flashed smiles at them from there, making flattering inquiries about each of them.

They had to admit the actor knew how to entertain.

He offered them nothing else, but from the first to the last moment of their visit he was capable of infusing the occasion with the air of a formal reception. He chattered of distant events, dismissing all objections with a forbearing smile. He praised Tibor’s deportment, Ábel’s observant eyes, and Ernõ’s expertise. In what particular field of endeavor Ernõ was supposed to be expert he did not specify. He presented Béla with a perfumed necktie.

The one-armed one was enraptured by this and walked around the room with a complacent smile. The actor, whom he had introduced to them, was a roaring success that afternoon. The gang relaxed. By the time the visit had ended they had established an atmosphere almost as free of tension as if they had been by themselves.

They had to wait till dusk so that they could slip away without being noticed. They took their leave one by one, Ábel being the last to go. The actor escorted his guests to the front door and bowed deeply. Having been left alone with Ábel he went over to the window and paid no attention to him. Ábel could see him only in profile. Line by line the mask dropped from the actor’s face. First the smile, then the tense attention, the nearsighted helpless look, and the droop of the lips. He stood in silence watching the increasingly dark street, his fingers drumming on the glass.

Ábel didn’t move. He was mesmerized by the change in the actor. He waited for him to speak. It was as if he was utterly exhausted. It was some time before he sluggishly turned his head and addressed him in a tired voice.

Still here? he asked sadly and solemnly. What’s keeping you, boy?

He stood stock still, his broad back covering the window. Ábel waited a moment, then anxiously made for the door and quickly closed it behind him. He stopped in the stairwell and looked back. He wasn’t being followed.

The voice of the actor stayed with him that night and made its way into his dreams.

THEY HAD TO DISCOVER WHAT THE ACTOR WAS doing in their midst. Their delicate ears could tell that the actor’s voice was sincere. He, who going by all outward signs must have belonged in the enemy camp, had played it perfectly, never once striking a false chord. He hadn’t been patronizing, nor too careful to be impartial, nor indeed too intimate. As far as they could tell it did not tire him to make this infinitely long journey from the shores of his world to theirs; he would undertake it in order to meet them on their own ground. Their sharp ears detected not a single false note. Too much sincerity, confidentiality, and amiability would have seemed as suspicious to them as false intimacy. Had the actor not been sincere, he would have had to juggle halftones and quartertones in their company, and observing such fine distinctions for such a time would have been too exhausting for him. They knew that adults were neither sincere nor trusting with each other. The actor spent his days among adults at rehearsals or at cafés with various local gentlemen of leisure. His regular companions included the short but extremely elegantly dressed editor of the local newspaper who greeted everyone in the most formal manner, the stage prompter of the company whom he had, as he casually declared, “first met abroad,” and the man who was his secretary, mailman, and financial consultant, fat Havas, the pawnbroker.

“Havas has money,” he indicated with a nervous movement when Ábel asked him something. “Not just money, but articles, possessions. You might not be aware of it yet but it is always advisable to keep on good terms with pawnbrokers. Whenever I arrive at a new town I make it my first business to befriend the editor and the pawnbroker. The two between them can help me achieve that which, alone, I would be incapable of achieving: immortality and sustenance. For a man to attain immortality it is necessary that he first survive.”

It was difficult to disagree with him. He had to walk some way to join them, or alternatively, they called over to his place on the afternoons they stayed in town. They kept the secrets of The Peculiar from him until the last possible moment. They weighed every slight shift of his voice on the most delicate of apothecary’s balances.

But the actor knew something the others didn’t. Was this his true nature or just some instinctive capacity for simulating? He could talk to them as no adult had ever done. Adults made the mistake of trying to talk to them as though they were adults. The actor committed no such crude faux pas. He tried to build no artificial bridges, and neither did he try to pretend he was one of them.

He talked like someone who had come home after a long day, put on his dressing gown, and felt comfortable in his own skin. He used the words they used, feeling no particular need to learn their own thieves’ argot. He sat down among them with a nervous dreamy look, his eyes flicking now up, now down, and said:

“How much younger you all are. Strange but you are younger than I thought you were. I was much older than you when I was eighteen. The years dropped off me later.”

He was not a giant who squatted down in order to look smaller so the dwarves should not be scared of playing with him; he was an outsize dwarf with a giant’s body and a wig whom adults hired for amusement and who, tired and disappointed after a day’s work, would go to join his dwarf companions.

Occasionally he smuggled them into the second-tier actors’ box at the theater. They sat anxiously at the back of the box while Amadé played to them. He made gestures only they would understand, conveying, with a glance here and phrase there, a complicity whose closeness only they would recognize. The actor performed with pretty much the same imperative as they did, distorting truth by means of a persona, adopting the painful rictus of a mask. To play was as obligatory for him as it was for them. It might be that the actor only ever truly comprehended the shape of his own life when he was acting, much as they sensed the reality of life behind every apparent reality.

IT WAS TIBOR’S COMPANY THAT MATTERED MOST to Ábel now. Tibor, master of the revels, accepted such intimacy with a mild, tolerant indifference, a decent forbearance. He found Ábel tiring but could see no way of avoiding contact.

Ábel would wait for him in front of his house, give the familiar whistle, and they would walk to school together along the river. Tibor had to dine once a week at Ábel’s. Ábel’s aunt was all in favor of the friendship. The companionship of this gentle, secretive boy seemed to her appropriate to what she imagined and hoped Ábel would be.

Of all Ábel’s friends Tibor was the only one of whom she was not jealous. She received the rest of the gang with a certain coolness, catering to them nervously, keeping a close eye on them, trying to translate their incomprehensible conversations into a language she could understand. She followed Ábel around helplessly as if somebody had stolen him from her, no longer daring to enter his room at night to kiss the sleeping boy as she had been used to doing just a year ago. She crept on tiptoe to his door, listening for his breathing as he slept, and her eyes filled with tears. Someone had stolen the contents of her life from her but she didn’t know the thief and had no idea just when the crime had taken place, so she slipped back into her room and spent the night sleepless, her heart beating, her thoughts anxious and confused.

Ábel was happy to make an exception of his aunt and hid his indifference and rebellion behind shows of affection. His aunt however sensed that behind this show Ábel was only forgiving her as a favor.

“I’m not taken by that Ernõ either,” she suddenly announced. “He’s after something, my child, I’m sure of it. His father is quite crazy too. Someone must have hammered one of his own hobnails through his head. And I don’t like the way Lajos laughs. One should forgive him because he has suffered much, but whenever he grins at me for no reason I feel cold shivers run up my spine. Be careful, my sweet one and only. Think of your father. Your father could get to the bottom of anything and knew the reason for everything. He’d be able to look into the eyes of your friend Zakarka and quickly discover what he was up to. He’d know why young Prockauer has taken to flashing smiles at people. I wouldn’t trust Béla either. His face is lined as if he spent his nights up to God knows what, it’s as yellow as parchment and full of spots. They’re whited sepulchers, all of them, darling. Mark my words. And by the way, where is your father’s violin? I’ve been looking for it for days. When he returns it’s the first thing he’ll want to find.”

Ábel didn’t know. He couldn’t tell his aunt that the violin had for weeks been resting in their bolt-hole at The Peculiar and that Béla, who knew not a note of music but could imitate the virtuosos he had never seen to perfection, would entertain them with silent performances on it. He had to pay a forfeit every time he dared touch the strings with the bow.

Now there’s your friend, Tibor, his aunt continued. Do you know what I like about him? I like the way he looks at me. Have you noticed how he blushes sometimes? When I address him he raises his eyes and blushes. And it’s a good sign when a boy blushes. And he has manners too. His father gave him a strict upbringing.

She would have been prepared to share him, but couldn’t bear to admit to herself that there was nothing left to share. Ábel, who had once been hers, was lost to her. The house was big and empty now. The town too seemed emptier without the men. Life no longer had a single comprehensive meaning for her. Ábel lowered his eyes whenever she spoke to him. She had noticed how often, reluctantly, possibly out of pity, he lied to her. He lied to her as if he didn’t want the truth to hurt her. And since she dared not investigate the lies she hastened to accept what the boy said.

The scent of Ábel’s childhood slowly faded from the rooms. Both of them went round trying to hang on to the lingering trail of it, searching for the life that had gone, the intimacy of the looks they had once cast on each other, the affection once implicit in their gestures. She gave in, and like all those who recognize some major mistake in their lives, found a calm indifference settling on her. The boy had, in some sense, been abducted. Some similar force had taken his father too. The meaning of her life had drifted away from her.

Ábel hovered around Tibor with a bad conscience. Ever since the actor had entered their lives the bond between them was fraught with tension and anxiety. Sometimes he was seized by such fierce jealousy that there were afternoons and nights when he had to slip out of his room, trudge over to Tibor’s house, and stand beneath the window to assure himself that Tibor was at home. Other times he would set up watch outside the actor’s house when the performances were over. He’d wait for hours for the actor to arrive, his heart in his mouth as he spied on him, feeling ashamed and yet relieved as he sneaked home again.

He endeavored to separate Tibor from the rest of the gang so that he could be alone with him. This experiment was all the more painful as he knew that Tibor found him dull company. Ábel worked with feverish enthusiasm to find amusements for Tibor. He dragged the secrets of home and hearth before him, hastened to bring him gifts, did his homework for him, got his aunt to cook him her special meals. He played the piano for him. He was more than willing to master the secrets of boxing, high jump, and gymnastics in order to amuse Tibor. He found various shy excuses to share his money with him and when, egged on by the gang, Tibor later executed the grand coup of pawning the family silver, he accompanied Tibor the entire length of the hazardous route. Perhaps if he were a direct witness to Tibor’s fall from grace he might gain some power over him. Perhaps he could be such a close accomplice in Tibor’s fall from grace that, if they had to sin and suffer, at least they might sin and suffer together.

Tibor found his company dull. He was careful to show his boredom nicely, with delicacy and good manners as Ábel noted to his despair. He talked in order to please him and got hold of books in order that Ábel might explain their contents to him.

A copy of Kuprin’s The Duel lay on Ábel’s desk.

“Incomprehensible and dull, isn’t it?” Tibor politely remarked. Ábel searched feverishly for an answer but gave up and fell silent, his head bowed.

“Incomprehensible and dull,” he said and stared ahead, stricken with guilt.

What did it matter that he had betrayed the spirits of great writers to gain Tibor’s favor? A volume of the humor magazine Fidibus lay on the shelf. Tibor reached over for it with considerable enthusiasm. Ábel observed and suffered as Tibor leafed slowly through pages of smutty jokes, carefully explaining them to him, feeling nervous in the presence of material of whose existence he had heard only by vague report. What could he give Tibor? Whenever they were separated he felt lost and hurt. He prepared himself for their meetings and tried to invent something new and surprising for each occasion. Meanwhile Tibor yawned discreetly, his hand covering his mouth.

He was distressed to feel so stupid, so inadequate to the honor of being Tibor’s companion. He examined himself in front of the mirror. His ginger hair, his myopic eyes, his freckled face, his scrawny body and bad posture made a painful spectacle compared to Tibor, who was fresh-faced, tall, refined yet certain in movement, held his head well, his eyes full of mild haughtiness and self-confidence, his expression conveying a raw yet delicate childishness.

He is my friend, thought Ábel, a hot sweet flush of gratitude running through him. He looks wonderful, he sometimes thought as if for the first time and felt the incomprehensible, agonizing shock of it all over again. He tried to entice Tibor into his own secret world. Tibor gazed with interest at Ábel’s house, taking in the courtyard, the garden, the secrets of the hidey-hole, and all the treasures of the vanished kingdom, while Ábel tried to conjure up for him the world of fairy tales and toys he had lived with in the glazed conservatory. Tibor followed him around, courteous and mildly bored. They talked of girls but Ábel sensed they were both lying. They competed in telling each other ever more lewd imagined adventures, not daring to look each other in the eye. They bragged of several lovers, extraordinary, quite remarkable sweethearts with whom—secretly of course—they were still in touch.

They were talking like this in the garden one day when Ábel suddenly fell silent in the middle of a story.

“It’s a lie,” he said and stood up.

Tibor also stood up, his face pale.

“What do you mean?”

“Every word I have ever spoken about girls was a lie. Not a word of it is true, not one. And you’re lying too. Admit it, you’re lying. Come on. Own up. Tibor, you are lying, aren’t you?”

They were both trembling. Ábel seized Tibor’s hand.

“Yes,” Tibor reluctantly confessed. “I’m lying.”

He freed his hand.

Ábel wanted to share his memories of his father with Tibor. For his father was only a memory now, a confusing figure shrouded in mist, adrift between the concepts of godhead and death. This was the one area where Tibor appeared to follow him with pleasure and enthusiasm. They exchanged memories of their fathers, of their first fears and of every little incident that continued to linger in their minds, glimmering there forever like distant shining myths. Tibor recounted his shock on discovering a fish-bladder condom in his father’s bedside-table drawer and described in some confusion—and with evident pain—his despair the first time his father failed to keep a promise and told a lie. He had run away with Lajos that day to hide in the stable at the barracks and felt so desperate he wanted to die.

They had no difficulty talking about their fathers. Their fathers were at the root of every difficulty: they were insincere, they refused to give straight answers, they wouldn’t say what they were suffering. The skies around their heavenly thrones had darkened to a gray shower of disappointments. The only way they could make proper peace with their fathers, suggested Ábel, would be eventually to form a pact with them.

I don’t think that’s possible, shuddered Tibor. Mine might just shoot me. He is in the mood for it. And he’d be perfectly entitled to, I think. If he came home tomorrow and failed to find the silverware or the saddle…What do you think it would be like if yours came back?

Ábel closed his eyes. His father’s return would be an extraordinary ceremonial occasion, something between a royal funeral and the emperor’s birthday. Bells would no doubt be rung as he marched in, then he’d sit down at the table, deplore the loss of his violin, and look for certain scissors and tweezers. Ábel would enter and stand before him.

“Delighted to see you, sir,” he would say and make a low bow. At that point all hell would break loose. Perhaps his father would raise his hand and hurl thunderbolts at him. But it might be that he would walk up to him and there would be an anxious moment while he considered the possibility of taking him in his arms, embracing him, and kissing him. So they would stare at each other, uncertain what to do.

“Maybe he will apologize,” ventured Ábel.

“Or else shoot me,” Tibor repeated obstinately.

THE CRISIS CAME TO A HEAD AT THE BEGINNING of October. Béla’s father conducted an audit and discovered the missing sums. They were small amounts at first and nobody thought to suspect Béla.

The first consequence of the discovery was that a sixteen-year-old apprentice boy was hauled before the court and sentenced to two years in juvenile detention.

The giant buildings of the house of correction rose beside the road that led to The Peculiar and whenever they retired to their hidden empire they were forced to pass by its outer perimeter. The lights of the windows of the correctional institution shone directly at them as they made their way back at night. The enormous red-brick hulks were visible behind high railings where a guard stood sentry at the entrance.

The hearings were concluded and Béla’s father sighed with relief that his staff and family members were found to be honest. Only they knew that the avalanche had started. The petty infringements discovered by the father, for which the boy rather than Béla was sent to be institution-alized—the apprentice having, to everyone’s surprise, admitted his guilt and spent little time denying anything—were insignificant compared to the “real” crime, Béla’s great break-in. These true facts were liable to be discovered any day. Should they be discovered, they would all be lost.

This possibility did not appeal to the actor either, he having been accepted into the gang so recently. Nevertheless he took the news of Béla’s crime with equanimity and did not blame any of them since he too had enjoyed a fair share of the money. If it were up to him, he said, he would settle the difference from his own pocket. Unfortunately it wasn’t up to him.

Béla had stolen six hundred crowns in one go, six one-hundred-crown bills. His father had sent him down to the post office with the money to post an order to one of his business acquaintances. Béla kept the money and simply told his father that he had sent it but could not find the receipt. The intended recipient, a rice merchant, was bound to claim the money a few days later and then they would all be lost.

What was strange was that Béla had not mentioned this vast sum to the gang. They had long got used to the fact that he always carried smaller amounts with him. Those hundreds seemed to have melted away in Béla’s pocket. When they interrogated him about it, it turned out that the actor who had complained of certain minor inconveniences had received a sum of two hundred crowns in three installments from Béla. The tailor’s bill was also rather more substantial than they had thought. Béla had kept the final invoice from the others, and when the tailor turned awkward, threatening to send it to his father, he paid what was owing.

The money had vanished, as Béla calmly declared, every last cent of it. With the last thirty crowns he had purchased, perfectly calmly, a revolver that they took from him by force and entrusted to Ernõ’s safe keeping. Béla’s behavior during all this was perfectly apathetic: he lost weight and his face seemed to collapse. He was preparing to die.

The gang held long extraordinary discussions that went on day and night. They had to produce the money in twenty-four hours and send it by telegram to Béla’s father’s business partner before irreparable harm was caused. Ábel performed miracles with his aunt, charming and bewitching her, but he could conjure no more than forty crowns from her.

It was at this time that they inducted the actor into the secrets of The Peculiar too. The actor accompanied them with a puzzled yet faintly bored smile, never denying that he had received money from Béla, shrugging his shoulders, for how should he have known where the money was from. I thought you were all rich, he said and gazed straight ahead as if in a dream.

They were not rich but their “warehouse,” as Ernõ referred to the store at The Peculiar, might possibly offer a few solutions. That was how the actor came to be there at the moment of mortal danger. All hands on deck, said the actor, and pretended to be the captain of a sinking ship giving his last orders. There was a time, somewhere between Naples and Marseille…, he said. He was made to swear to keep the secrets of The Peculiar on pain of death.

The actor was happy enough to swear, his only condition being that he should be able to wear a frock coat and that the table should be prepared with four burning candles. He entered the secret room nervously, his face showing no interest, without removing his gloves, his hat still on his head, and stood in the middle of the room, sniffing the air like a connoisseur and declaring in a frostily polite voice and with a stiff, unsmiling expression: Charming! He brightened when he spotted the store of clothes. They had to dress up there and then. He gave tiny cries of delight as he knotted neckties, forgetting the frosty politeness and show of indifference with which he had entered, took a step or two backward, and produced the most exquisite effects with a movement of his eyebrow. They were not going to make any progress with the problem of Béla that afternoon. They were all infected by the actor’s enthusiasm. Béla dressed and undressed with a desperate concentration, throwing on one item after another, while the actor delved drunkenly into the store of neckties, silk shirts, and cosmetics that Béla had so thoughtfully and skillfully accumulated. Once they were all strutting around in costumes the actor spread his arms like the conductor of an orchestra, took a step backwards, and with a serious, concerned expression examined each of them in turn, then, his head set back, under half-closed lids, summed up his general impression: “You should all be on stage,” he said. And after a short meditative pause: “In an amateur sense, I mean.”

They too felt they should be on stage. The utter impossibility of their ambition depressed them. “With an invited audience…,” suggested the actor. “Without written parts, of course. Everyone would be free to say whatever came into his head.” With the actor to encourage them in their strange costumes they suddenly marveled at their wealth. The problem was that the treasure trove of inestimable value that they had amassed was worth very little in ready cash. They sneaked back into town that evening feeling they were doomed. As they were preparing to part, Lajos waved Tibor over and put his hand on his shoulder.

“The silver,” he said.

“The silver?” asked the actor, pricking up his ears. “What silver? If you have silver everything can be fixed.”

He pronounced this with such authority that they fell silent, quite awestruck. They knew what silver. The silver that lay in a leather trunk under the bed of the colonel’s wife! Only the actor had been ignorant of the silver, and now the solution was perfectly clear to him.

“As long as the silver is really there,” he repeated anxiously. “I’ll have a word with Havas. He is a friend of mine and knows all about silver.”

“What did you think would happen?” Tibor slowly turned to Béla, speaking with childishly clear enunciation, breaking the words up into syllables. His voice was full of infinite wonder. “What did you think you would do? You must have known they would discover the loss.”

They stood on the street corner in the light of a gas lamp, forming a tight dark group. It was at this moment that Béla’s self-control deserted him.

“Think? Me?!” he declared with great indignation. “I didn’t think anything. How could I have thought at all? No. And you?” he hesitated as if he were deeply astounded by something. “Did any of you think at all, at any time?”

And this was exactly what had to be said at that precise moment, in the first moment of sanity they had experienced for months; this was what had to be said in order to set Tibor’s question in the real world and expose the unreality of their own actions. It was a question their fathers might have asked, or the mayor, or anyone at all, anyone except Tibor. For the first time they understood that the world they had constructed around themselves, that sheltered them, would collapse about their ears if they broke one single law of the real one.

Conveniently, the colonel’s wife had to be taken into the hospital for two days of observation so Ábel and Tibor took the silver and handed it over to Havas. Béla managed to transfer the money to the merchant with a certain regret, as if he could think of better uses for it. Afterwards Ábel insisted they should visit the apprentice boy who was serving Béla’s sentence for him.

Béla had only the faintest memory of the boy. Once they received their visitors’ permits and, deeply embarrassed, had laden themselves with fruits and other foodstuffs, they waited for him in the reception room of the correctional institute in a state of ever greater anxiety and restlessness. Through the windows they could see the workshops where other inmates labored—the joinery, the locksmith’s, and the bakery—while a detachment of blue-uniformed others puttered about between the long flower beds, attended by a guard. There were quite a few there and each year of the war produced its fresh harvest of them. They gazed at the bars on the dormitory block windows, the bleak hall where they themselves silently loitered, the benches covered with waxed canvas and the single crucifix on the wall. This house of correction was specifically set aside for those who shared their own world and they had never felt so keenly divided from the world and society of adults as they did in the minutes they spent there. They were forced to see that while they played and—half consciously, half unconsciously—built their own society like a cell within adult society, theirs was just one cell of the real world. They understood that there existed not just a cell but a whole world like theirs, a world whose laws, ethics, and structure differed sharply from that of the adults, and that this world had a dynamic that was equal to the one in which adults struggled and perished, that had its own hierarchies and mysterious coherence. They couldn’t help feeling that there was a logic behind all that they had done these last few years. It might have been their task, their vocation, to maintain the principle of everything-for-its-own-sake. They huddled closer together and gazed sympathetically through the window at all those unknown others of their kind.

The boy came in somewhat reluctantly, his instructor exhorting him to take more confident steps, his cap in his hand, and approached them with a suspicious look on his face. They gathered round him and spoke to him quietly. The boy had bright passionate eyes, intelligent and stubborn.

“Why did you confess?” asked Béla in a whisper.

The boy cast an anxious glance towards his instructor who was staring out of the window. He gestured for a cigarette and quickly sneaked it into the lining of his cap.

“Because I stole things, you idiot,” he scornfully muttered.

They stared at him, uncomprehending. Then, speaking very fast and very quietly, he launched into a speech.

“What do you think? That I was idiot enough to get myself locked up here if they didn’t have anything on me? Sure, I stole, and more, more than they know. Lucky for me the gang didn’t rat on me. We all stole from the shop, and from the warehouse too.”

He fell silent, looked into their eyes suspiciously, then, relaxing, continued. “You stole more than I did, of course, I knew that perfectly well, but what’s that to do with me? That’s your business. Careful, he’s looking this way.”

The instructor walked up to them, they handed over the packages and said their goodbyes with averted eyes. They crossed the big garden without a word while the child prisoners stopped work and watched them go. Once they were far enough away from the gate Ernõ was the first to break the silence.

“They had a gang too,” he mouthed with amazement.

“And a hiding place,” Béla humbly acknowledged.

Lost in thought, they meandered back towards the town where, presumably, there were many gangs just like theirs with hiding places like the room at The Peculiar. They must be there, all over the world, in towns inhabited by adults, among barracks and churches, little robber gangs, millions and millions of them. All there, with their own hiding places, with their own rules, all under the spell of some extraordinary imperative, the imperative to rebel. And they sensed they would not be part of this strange world for much longer, that pretty soon perhaps they too would be classed as enemies by a pre-adult or two. It was painful to be aware of that, to know that something was irretrievable, and they hung their heads.

WHAT THEY COULD NOT BELIEVE, HOWEVER, WAS that all four of them were virgins.

They had lied so much to each other and to others beyond their circle about this, with lies so extraordinarily convoluted, that the truth that seemed, somehow, to pop out in the actor’s presence was more shocking to them than to the actor. Their anatomical knowledge of the arts of love had seemed perfect, almost infinitely so. Every single one of their previous companions bragged—and not always untruthfully—that they had crossed the threshold and survived love’s ordeal of fire. They had chattered of love and women with such apparent expertise that once the truth was out it sounded quite incredible. Each of them was aware of everyone else’s indulgence in the solitary vice, and there was no particular reason to be skeptical about Béla since he had never denied it.

The actor’s dark Mississippi-minstrel eyes rolled rapidly under the closed lids.

“You neither?” he turned grandly to Ábel who was chewing his lips and shook his head to confirm.

“Ah!” he spun round to Tibor. “But you, Tibor. Not you? Not once?”

Tibor nodded, his cheeks scarlet, to indicate, Never.

“Béla? You, who for such a long time supplied money to last year’s juvenile lead? You told me so yourself!”

The actor fluttered round his room, rubbing his hands.

“And you, Ernõ?”

Ernõ took off his pince-nez as he always did when confused.

“No,” he answered dully.

The actor grew solemn.

“This is a very serious matter,” he said, frowning. He retreated to a corner of the room, his hands linked behind his back, and was visibly shaken. He talked quietly, walking up and down, taking no notice of them.

“Virgins!” he repeated, and flung his arms up to heaven. “You’re not lying?” he turned anxiously towards them. “No, no, of course you’re not lying,” he reassured himself. “But in that case…astonishing, quite astonishing, my friends!” he cried. “How old are you? You’ve had your birthday? Stout chap! And you? Your birthday is yet to come? Oh, my poor little lamb, my poor dear lambs.” He spread his arms wide and brayed with laughter.

“Don’t for a moment think,” he stopped, suddenly concerned, “that I am laughing at you. It is a beautiful thing being without sin…you can have no idea how splendid it is. You must all have guardian angels. If only I had a guardian angel.”

He dropped his arms in a tragic manner.

“Unfortunately I have never had one.”

Ábel stood up.

“I swear on oath,” he said and raised two fingers. “I swear that I have never been with a girl.”

“Never?” Béla inquired. “Should we repeat the oath after him?”

“I swear on oath,” they all said, Tibor blushing but firmly and loudly, Ernõ with bowed head, like someone who had once committed a sin and would never dare repeat the experiment.

They sniffed around each other like dogs. They reminded each other of their old, confused, bombastic lies. Béla had told them he had a child that he visited twice a year. They had spoken of the licensed brothel with such familiarity you would have thought they were practically habitués of it. But now came the revelation that, with the exception of Tibor who had once ventured as far as the door only to recoil from it, not one of them had dared even approach the threshold of the red-light establishment.

“I was in second grade,” recounted Tibor in a dreamy, singsong voice, “when one morning in the town where we then lived, I took a roundabout route to pass the brothel. I was perfectly clear about its function, about who lived there and who called on them. I knew it was full of girls and I think I had even heard something about the tariff from someone. There was nothing particular in my head as I passed it, nothing either pleasant or unpleasant. I merely turned my head towards it. I had a school satchel on my back, full of books. It was half past seven and, as I passed, a young man came out of the house. He wore a cap and a shirt open at the neck. As he slammed the door the bell rang and he stopped to tie up his shoelaces, propping his foot on the step. He didn’t look round. He didn’t care who saw him, he simply continued tying his shoelaces, as if he were at home, sitting on his own bed. There was nothing strange about this and I knew where the young man had come from and, roughly, what he had been doing in there. He had been with the girls. Not that I knew precisely what he would have done with the girls but I suspected it was that about which adults lied to us, that which they had kept a secret. I had learned almost everything from the servants. But what shook me, and shook me so powerfully I had to stop, and with all those books on my back, lean against the wall of some house, wasn’t that the young man had been with the girls, but that, inside there, he had taken his shoes off. He had been with a girl and had taken his shoes off…What could he have been doing, what kind of thing can anyone do that involves taking off your shoes? It’s hard for me to say this. Perhaps because…that was why I didn’t really dare go with a girl myself. Because there I was at the threshold of the place, my hand on the doorknob, when the image of the boy came back to me, this boy doing his shoes up. Silly thing of course, he had slept with the girl, he must have taken his shoes off. But as far as I was concerned…laugh if you like, but for me there was something terrible about this, as if someone had told me he had killed the girl, or simply committed some indescribably filthy act in there.”

“Worse than that,” said Ernõ solemnly.

“Yes, isn’t it?” said Tibor, turning to Ernõ with eyes full of wonder, and continuing in that same even singsong voice. “I too think it was far worse. The boy unhurriedly tied up both shoelaces, pulled the cap down over his eyes, and went on his way, whistling blithely. It was early morning and there wasn’t anyone else in the street. I could hear the tap tap of his shoes as he walked away into the distance. I was still leaning against the wall. What could he have done? What could he have done? He was with a girl, they were both naked…without even a shirt perhaps…I was all twisted up inside…but the shoes, the shoes. Why did he have to take them off? It must be a terrible form of nakedness, I thought, where one person has to take off his shoes in front of someone, and then lie down with her in a bed, shoeless.”

The actor kept blinking and was pursing his lips as he waited.

“Well, that tops it all,” he said and nodded.

“Indeed it does. The whole of that morning I couldn’t help thinking about it. I didn’t dare ask anyone. But as always happens, you know, something inevitably comes along to raise the pitch of one’s terror…That lunchtime when I got home I put my books down still nauseated and disgusted, sick with excitement, and went into the dining room where I found my father sitting on the divan, cursing. I kissed his hand and waited. Father had just returned from the stables. He was wearing a summer jerkin, breeches, and riding boots. He was cursing because he had been calling for the servant. The servant having gone off somewhere, he ordered me to pull off his boots and bring him his slippers. There can’t have been anything unusual about this but I don’t recall him ever asking us boys to do this kind of thing and it hasn’t happened since. And it had to be just that day…I stared at my father’s dusty boots in despair and I couldn’t bring myself to extend my hands towards them. But Father leaned back in the divan and read the paper, paying no attention to me, simply extending his leg towards me. I put out my hand to touch the boots and fainted.”

“You started vomiting,” the one-armed one recalled without emotion. He was sitting calmly in the corner, his knees drawn up high, his chin propped on his remaining hand, crouched and expectant.

“Yes, I started to throw up. The trouble with that was that once I had come to, my father started beating me with the horsewhip because in his indignation he couldn’t imagine any reason for my sickness other than that I found the sight of his feet repulsive. The truth is I had never felt any disgust regarding his feet because I never even considered the possibility that my father had feet.”

“And that’s why you remained a virgin,” the actor declared as if establishing the fact.

“That’s why I remained a virgin,” Tibor repeated in the same flat singing voice. He opened his eyes wide and gazed calmly around the room.

“There, that wasn’t so hard,” said Ábel, his voice cracking. “I don’t think there’s anything particularly strange about the fact that we…we haven’t been with women. Don’t you think there’s a reason for that? Perhaps we’re together, the four of us, because…because not one of us has been with a woman. I don’t know. But I don’t think there’s anything impossible about it.”

The one-armed one let go his knees and leapt from his chair.

“But I…,” he gabbled, “…ever since it was cut off…I haven’t dared show it to a woman.”

The actor stepped over to him and put his arm round his shoulder to console him. But the one-armed one pushed him away, snatched the empty sleeve of his jerkin from his pocket with two fingers, and held it high with a look of contempt. They immediately surrounded him, talking to him. Béla stroked the stump where his arm should have been. Lajos was speaking, leaving words unfinished, his bloodless lips trembling, his whole body shaking. They laid him down on the actor’s bed and sat silently at his side. The one-armed one eventually stopped shivering and closed his eyes. They said nothing. Tibor held the one-armed one’s hand. A single teardrop ran from under the closed eyelids all the way down his face onto his jerkin. The one-armed one bit his lip. Quietly Tibor stood up and with elegant, light steps went over to Ábel, beckoning him to follow him to the window recess.

“You won’t be in a position to know this,” he whispered, “but Lajos has never cried before. I beg you to believe me. Not once in his life.”

THE ACTOR WAITED UNTIL THEY HAD GONE. Then he ambled out of the apartment, sucking a perfumed mint. The girl with the rickets was playing in the doorway. The actor selected a mint from his pocket and asked the girl to dance a little dance on point for him. He joined her in the dance, and they twirled round in the entrance for a few moments, the actor’s arms raised high above his head, the white sweet in his hand glittering temptingly while the rapt child gazed at it like a puppy, her crooked little body finding it hard to twirl and remain on point at the same time. The actor took a few turns with her, then shook his head sadly like a talent scout who had lost faith in his latest discovery, and with a tired gesture popped the sweet in the child’s mouth. A thin woman in a headscarf had stopped to watch the man and child dancing. She weighed them up with grave, close attention. The actor greeted her amiably and drifted away under the boughs of the wayside trees. He was thinking that he should ask for an advance at the theater where they hated him. He smiled, thinking of that, and looked haughtily in front of him. He was thinking he should send his light green spring outfit to the cleaners. He was thinking it had become impossible trying to buy a decent American Gillette blade in the monarchy, that German razors were nowhere near as good as American ones. He was thinking he should start dieting next week. He remembered the name of a masseur who once worked on him for a week and who later hanged himself. He might have gone mad while shaving my throat, he thought and wagged his head disapprovingly. He gazed at the light green boughs of the trees and quietly whistled an aria from the new operetta. There were two steps back to make here, and one thing to duck, so…He looked around; no, not here, it wouldn’t do. He thought he might leave town soon. Once the war was over he would have the hernia operation. He was just passing the pastry shop and he thought of his younger brother who once, for no discernible reason, purchased a box of honey-loaf cakes and brought it over to his place in town where he was working as apprentice to a photographer, as a gift, then, next day, having finished his business, went home. Later he worked as a machinist. He disappeared somewhere in France. He thought he should keep an eye on Ernõ. These quiet hang-dog types could be dangerous. There was that incident with the one-eyed beggar: he had woken one night to find the man standing over him with a knife in his hand, grinding his teeth. You had to watch everyone, even the one-armed one, but Ernõ more than most. He was whistling. He passed the drugstore and spent some time examining the display, being strongly tempted to go in and buy some balls of camphor, not so much as a defense against moths as a fragrance. The strong, sour smell of camphor flooded his senses. He walked on in a bad mood. After all, anyone can afford to buy camphor, even the poorest people. He only had to saunter through the door in an indifferent manner and casually ask for a pinch of camphor. No one would suspect that he wanted the camphor not as moth repellent but to sniff. He didn’t have a penny on him. He had to have a word with Havas before he got to the theater. He felt uncomfortable about this. Never, not once in his life, not for a second had he felt certain that he would not have to pack and move on at a moment’s notice, in the middle of the night. He felt tense: the air he sniffed was full of menace. It was as if everything in the world were perishing. He wrinkled his nose. He wanted to speak to Havas to tell him that he should take care of his fingers. Nothing more than that he should take care of his fingers. He took a deep breath. The air was dense with the fresh, heavy smell of loam.

The pawnbroker sat behind the barred window. He was alone. The actor entered, whistling and swinging his cane, his hat pushed back to the crown of his head but carefully lest it disturb his wig. The pawnbroker stood up, came out from behind the counter, and propped his elbow against the grille. The actor looked about him dreamily as if it were his first visit, taking in the board that said “Receipt of Goods” and its partner, “Issue of Goods.” He leaned against the bars without a word of greeting and stared in front of him.

“Just imagine!” he remarked casually, swiveling his Kentucky minstrel eyes. “They’re all virgins.”