The Rebels

3

THE PERFORMANCE WAS OVER. THE REVOLVING doors were in full swing and the night regulars were arriving, in dribs and drabs, including members of the company. The bon vivant who had not removed all traces of theatrical makeup passed the booth, stopped, flashed his gold teeth, and dropped some quiet remark to the comic. Both laughed. The actor ignored them. He had delivered his major sketch about the effects of vodka on the human sensitivity to color. Now he was sitting, panting slightly, recovering.

The prima donna took her place among the usual crowd at the bohemian table. The actor fixed his curious eye on the door. The director hadn’t yet arrived and the seat on the prima donna’s right was unoccupied. The director was like the captain of a sinking ship: he was the last to leave the theater, the night’s takings in his pocket. He wouldn’t go until the cleaners had swept the auditorium clean.

Let’s wait until my assistant reports back, said the actor cautiously, his hand before his mouth. It would be wiser to wait till then.

He had plans that he had been mysteriously hinting at all evening. They weren’t feeling too good. They leaned on the table in desultory fashion, drank their beer, and gazed at the stream of new arrivals. It was the first time in their lives they could sit in the café legally, without anxiety, without fear of being spotted. They had occupied this booth before but for only a half an hour at a time, shivering slightly with the curtains drawn. Tonight was the first occasion on which they could take their place without sneaking in, without embarrassment.

They couldn’t help but notice in the first half hour they spent in the adult camp as equals that it was not all gaiety here. Or if gaiety there was, there was less of it than they had imagined the day before. The edgy excitement of the entertainment had quite vanished. A few weeks ago, when such excursions were still counted as a dangerous enterprise, they hadn’t noticed the insultingly patronizing manner of the waiter or the servile to-ing and fro-ing of the café manager who had condescended to conceal and shelter them. This confidentiality seemed humiliating to them now and lent a certain tension to the evening. They sat in low spirits, noticing for the first time the dinginess of the décor, breathing in the stale and bitter air.

“What is it?” asked Tibor.

Ábel gave a wry laugh.

“Do you remember how we used to look through the window whenever we came by here?”

Boredom gave way to anxious lassitude. What if everything they had only known from the outside turned out like this? If everything that had been alien and other were now becoming familiar, so that they could relax and take command of the world along with all those secrets that adults fought tooth and nail over—money, freedom, women—and they discovered that it was all quite different and much duller than they had thought?

“I’m bored,” said Béla, wrinkling his nose.

He raised his monocle to his eye and glared about him. Other tables smiled back at them. At about eleven their history master appeared in the café. Ernõ spoke a quiet word of command and the gang immediately leapt to their feet, made deep bows, and in singsong unison greeted the teacher.

“Your humble servant, sir!”

The chorus rang like music in the room. The elderly man in the pince-nez returned the school greeting, gave a clumsy bow, and muttered in confusion: “Your humble servant.” The master hurried away to escape the embarrassing scene. Ábel was of the opinion that he had blushed. Slowly they began to recover their confidence.

“That’s the way it has to be,” said Ernõ. “One has to be careful. Even tomorrow we shall have to hide our cigarettes when anyone approaches us. And we will have to bow deep in greeting, much deeper than we have ever done before. The waiter will have to draw the curtains, and the manager will have to watch that we’re not spotted.”

They hatched a plan for the following week to confront all their teachers in the afternoon, singly and together, before the staff disappeared on vacation, and ask them to fill in the blanks in their knowledge regarding certain as yet unclear details. They should enter with the utmost humility, stuttering, twisting their hats in their hands, and put their question red-faced, humming and hawing, exactly as they used to do.

Ernõ stood up.

“For instance, you go into Gurka and say: ‘Your humble servant, sir, I beg your pardon, I do not mean to be a nuisance, forgive me for disturbing you, sir.’ He is sitting at his desk, he pushes his glasses up to his forehead, gives a croak, and screws up his eyes. ‘Who is that?’ he asks in that nasal voice of his. ‘A student? What does the student want?’ You move closer, you twist your hat in your hands, you can hardly speak for respect, you are so deeply honored. Gurka slowly rises. ‘Really,’ he says. ‘Do my eyes not deceive me? Can it really be Ruzsák? It really is you, Ruzsák.’ Then he comes up to you and extends his hand in the greatest embarrassment because he is the master who could have failed you, twice, and has only permitted you to pass now because the army needs you and the commissioner insisted on it. And he is the one who has beaten you time and again right up until fourth grade. He is the one who stood guard on every street corner where girls were to be found and frequently caught the flu because he had been lurking in gateways for hours on end, keeping a sneaky watch on us. He was the one who had his suits made so that the collar covered half his face up to the earlobes, only so that he could creep up on groups of students unnoticed. Gurka. That’s your man. He is frowning suspiciously. He doesn’t know whether to sit you down or not, so you just stand there, listening, staring at him. He is already regretting offering his hand for you to shake. What can the student be wanting? Whatever it is he can’t be up to any good. Perhaps he has brass knuckles in his pocket, or a dagger. ‘Now, now, Ruzsák,’ he says, gasping for air. ‘What brings you here?’ You, in the meantime, just stand there, trembling, flushed.”

They drew closer together. This they understood. The waiter drew the curtains, concealing them.

“You drop your hat, you cough,” said Ábel.

“Maybe. And then you say, ‘I have made so bold, sir…with your kind permission…I make so bold as to disturb you,’ shifting from one foot to the other. Gurka relaxes. He puts his hand on your shoulder. ‘Speak up, Ruzsák, no need to get in a state about it. I know, my boy. The Creator has not distributed his intellectual gifts equally. In your case, Ruzsák, I have often had to spur you on to greater efforts, indeed, Ruzsák, I may have called you an ass or a numbskull. Don’t take it to heart. What’s done is done. There are professions, my boy, that make no great intellectual demands, require no sharpness of mind, such as is required by, say, a teacher. Why don’t you become a grocer, Ruzsák? There are many professions in the world. The important thing is to carry out whatever duties life imposes on you with honor.’

“But you just continue humming and hawing. And when he claps you on the shoulder the second time you stop. ‘The reason I am here, sir, is because I have doubts.’ ‘Out with them, Ruzsák.’ ‘The course on Tacitus,’ you say. ‘What about the course on Tacitus?’ Gurka glances at the door, at the window. He clearly doesn’t understand. ‘That part, that bit about…,’ you say and produce a book from your bag. Gurka puts his glasses on, glances this way and that, not quite knowing what to do. What does the student want? But you, by then, are relaxed and modest. At your ease now you explain the matter. ‘It’s this sentence here, sir, if you’ll pardon me,’ and you open the book and point to the passage. ‘I suspect I haven’t understood it properly, sir. I had all kinds of doubt about it afterwards. I do agonize about it as I would not like to have missed the meaning of the detail.’”

Béla leaned forward, his entire face split by a vast grin.

“It’s that plusquam-perfectum, sir. I just can’t see it,” he said, beaming and rubbing his hands.

“Yes. That’s why you have returned. You tell him you don’t want to bother him at all but that you wouldn’t want to leave with this doubt gnawing at you. You wouldn’t want to find yourself on the battlefield without first having cleared up this passage of Tacitus.”

“There are these two verbal prefixes I don’t understand,” said Béla. “Just these two little ones.”

“Gurka sits you down,” continued Ernõ. “He removes his glasses and looks you over for a while. ‘You, Ruzsák?’ he says. ‘Now, when the exams are over? What am I to make of this, Ruzsák?’ ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ you answer firmly but respectfully. ‘It’s just that I have doubts. Having studied under your tutelage, sir, for eight years…for eight years, sir…I have recognized the importance of such matters. There is Horace for example. And Cicero. If sir would be so kind…just one or two obscure passages…’”

The prompter stuck his head through the curtains.

“The place is yours,” he said. Only his bald head and brow and his puffy red nose protruded between the drapes, his body remained invisible. He had learned from watching actors at work. He turned his head right and left as if a machine were swiveling it and suddenly vanished. It was like a vision.

Music was playing. The air was thick with the sweet, exciting din of conversation, plates clattering, and a clumsy waltz rhythm. The actor started making preparations to leave. He checked his wig in a pocket mirror, licked his thumb and forefinger, and smoothed his eyebrows. He drew on his gloves slowly, with great care. The actor always put on his gloves as though they were brand new and he was trying them on for the first time: he started with the four fingers, waited a moment, then hastily, with a certain modesty, thrust his thumb into the waiting hole as if it were following its four senior brothers.

“I shall go ahead,” said the actor. “You should follow me after a little while, in ones and twos. Lajos, you bring up the rear. I will be waiting for you at the stage door.”

He put his index finger to his lips and winked.

“Be quiet. Be tactful,” he whispered.

He almost slammed the curtain behind him. They heard his high, singsong voice greeting other customers.

“You must ask Moravecz to explain the real reasons for Joseph II’s unpopularity,” Ernõ continued. “‘This fat horse here is the clergy, your majesty, this one is the aristocracy, and this starved blind nag is the people…,’ you say. This curious image of history, you feel, has not received the recognition due to it. Here, since you are not in a hurry, is the ideal opportunity for him to expound its virtues…‘In Louis the Great’s reign, sir, the stars of North, East, and South are in three different seas…Why exactly was that?’”

“I don’t understand it either,” said Tibor solemnly, slightly troubled.

“You have to be very careful about the tone of the questions,” said Ernõ. “That’s the hardest part of it. You must be respectful but firm. After all you are not demanding anything…it’s nothing more than going back into a shop where you bought something and asking one last time about the worth and quality of the goods you have purchased. Or if you were asking for operating instructions. They are obliged to give you that much. The main thing is that you are simply unable to sleep because your conscience is so troubled by that passage in Tacitus. That’s what you have to emphasize. We can rehearse tomorrow.”

“There may be other matters we can bring up,” said Béla. “Jurák could apologize to the music teacher for his out-of-tune singing. He could even ask for extra lessons, now as a late compensation. We could raise the money.”

“What I want to know is what Amadé is up to,” said Ábel.

No one knew what Amadé was cooking up, not even Lajos. Béla discreetly part-closed the drapes and they peered through the remaining gap. There they were all sitting: the actress with the director on her right, now arrived and chewing a piece of wurst, the drugstore owner on her left. The editor sat at the end of the table, waiting with bated breath for a crumb of gossip to be tossed his way. Two young officers in dress uniform were sipping champagne. The manager of the café was leaning against the buffet bar. He had a heart problem: his face looked strained, his jaundiced-looking sickly hands hanging by his sides. Why should anyone be here if they were not obliged to be? It was hard to hear themselves talk over the racket. Ábel reflected that even the childhood evenings spent in his father’s study with those three gentle buffoons were more fun.

He slowly relaxed and the acute tension to which he had been subject melted away. The shame, the confusion, the sense of shock he had felt after the gang had dispersed at noon gave way to a numb indifference. He was sitting close to Tibor and that was all that mattered. Yesterday he still knew that once he had woken up he would see him in half an hour or an hour and that he would invent some story or an item of unexpected gossip that Tibor would receive with his usual polite, drawling “Really?” but that it wouldn’t matter as he would be standing there beside him, listening to him, no one else. But as of noon today, this feeling of assurance, that he would see Tibor at the arranged times and talk to him without anything getting in the way, had vanished forever. He stared at the dirty ceiling, the crumbling walls, and was amazed. He had to bow his head for fear the others would see him crying. He felt the unsettling pain of loss, an apprehension that danger could not be avoided, the kind of thing no one could bear for long. They sat exhausted, gazing at the grimy superior world of adults, this desolate paradise.

“Intra muros,” Ábel remarked sourly.

They looked at him, puzzled. Tibor was particularly pale this evening. He sat formal and silent, his head in his hands as if at a funeral. Ábel didn’t dare ask him what the matter was. You could never be certain of anything with Tibor for he often surprised you with what he said, things so idiotic sometimes they made you blush. He might perhaps have answered, as he did last Sunday, that it was all the Vasas soccer team’s fault: they should have scored with a free kick at the end. Whenever Tibor looked thoughtful it was likely that his mind had wandered into uncharted territory. Ábel was always afraid that he’d eventually say something that lowered his stock in Ernõ’s eyes. It was only Ernõ he feared: Béla and Lajos never criticized Tibor with such severity. He was afraid Tibor would commit some faux pas or say something stupid, and that he would have to be ashamed on his friend’s behalf.

How long can it last? he wondered. And what then? The spell that held them together might be broken in a matter of minutes. One word and, like an overloaded fuse, the electricity would snap off and all would be darkness. They had long prepared for this evening. Ábel couldn’t say what precisely he was expecting, what form of liberation. The only thing that surprised him was how extraordinarily morose they all felt. It had never occurred to him that the moment of freedom would appear so unattractive.

It was their low stature that made them nervous: they had suddenly fallen from the highest echelons of their own hierarchy to the rank of second-rate adults.

“We have to start over again, right from the beginning,” he said.

NOT ONE OF THEM WANTED TO SET OFF WITHOUT Tibor. Who’ll go first, asked Ernõ. When they remained silent, Tibor made no move: he too waited silently, expectantly, staring at the marble-topped table. He didn’t look up, knowing it was him they were waiting for, that they were watching him closely. He was determined to say nothing. The way they competed for his affection, the passionate loyalty they radiated from every side, even more powerfully, more jealously now than before, made him all the more obstinate. He sat like the wounded Paris, biting his lip.

This jealousy radiating from each of them individually, a jealousy whose intensity he could not help but feel, shook and embittered him. He felt anxious, uncertain of himself. Friendship was a burden. It was nice to know that the bonds that had so far united them had now been broken. Thinking this he felt a sense of freedom and lightness. He no longer needed their friendship. It was too much, it weighed him down. Ábel’s enthusiasms, Ernõ’s jealousy, Béla’s leech-like clinging, the actor’s games and very being: it was all excessive, he could no longer bear it. He felt a great relief contemplating the possibility that, within a month perhaps, the barracks would be his home. No longer would there be Mother, Lajos, and Ábel constantly asking him to account for his every movement, no longer would he suffer the insufferably critical gaze of Ernõ, no longer would he have to endure the presence of Béla, that mincing shadow. He had had enough of them all. He thought fondly of the front of which he knew nothing, only that it would mean a final break with the life he had been leading, a life whose tensions he could no longer bear. His father’s face appeared before him out of the chaos, cast in bronze like some heroic statue. There was something certain you could cling to there, though the enormous weight of it oppressed everyone around him. Tibor wanted to settle his bill with Havas. Tomorrow he would speak to his mother and maybe even confess everything, but the important thing was to pay Havas off, to recover the silver, then, with a light heart, to say farewell to Ábel and Ernõ, clap Béla on the shoulder, avoid the actor, and, free as a bird, to enter the barracks, maybe the war itself, that great community of adults where he would no longer be responsible for anything, where he would no longer be the idol of a small votary circle all the more burdensome because he was incapable of reciprocating their feelings. Everything would be fine, it would all be all right, a word might be enough and they would all be free of this aching, agonizing spell. He no longer knew who he was. The rules of the game had become confusing, incomprehensible. They were sitting around, waiting for something to happen. What had happened? Whose fault was it? He felt no sense of guilt. He had simply tolerated their loyalty to him. He had been fair: he tolerated them all equally. He felt he had assumed a great burden he could barely support. He had to shake it off with one great effort and move on. He was fed up with the game. He couldn’t stand it any longer: it agitated him so keenly that his whole nervous system rejected it.

He thought of Ábel and cast a glance at him. The doctor’s son immediately returned his glance with such enthusiasm, such feverish anticipation and readiness to leap to his feet and carry out his orders, that he felt guilty and miserable as he averted his eyes. People were so hard to reject. We think we are free but when we try to tear ourselves away we find we cannot move a muscle. Someone smiles at us heedlessly and immediately we are entangled in that person’s friendship. He didn’t know what friendship was. He had imagined friendship differently, as taking a lighthearted, pleasant walk, a kind of fellow feeling that imposed no obligations. People spend time with each other, exchanging ideas…And for the first time it struck him that such a bond might weigh on one, that it might not be breakable without causing injury.

But it didn’t depress him to think that such injury might be inevitable. So what if he hurt someone? Why not punch Ernõ in the face and dislodge that pince-nez, why not fetch Ábel a mighty blow or squash Béla’s nose, then stride away with head held high? The problem was that he couldn’t just walk out, that a man cannot simply abandon a world, a habitation he himself has shaped. They all lived on the same planet and none of them could stop inhabiting it: they were their own sun, their own atmosphere, held together by forces none of them could overcome alone.

I might be able to make my peace with each of them, he thought hopefully. It was not impossible. I’ll have a word with Havas, and tomorrow, when Ábel gives that whistle I’ll tell him I don’t have the time. Perhaps I will write a letter to Father and ask him to come home. If he were here and he forgave me, no one would dare come anywhere near me.

He turned his face away with a proud suffering look. What are they looking at? he strained to think. Perhaps they’re waiting for me to stand up so they can form a line behind me, and I won’t be able to take a step without them because they’re scared I might escape. Oh, to be through with all this! To forget! To play something else, some completely different game! Now, when we are free to play what we like…To forget these years, the gang, the thefts, the anxiety, the entire game, this whole crazy painful rebellion…Let them feel some pain. Somewhere at the back of his mind he wondered why it hurt when people loved you. Every nerve in his body, every sinew, bristled and protested against the demands that he felt to be radiating from the others. They all wanted him exclusively to themselves, he thought. They’re jealous. Filled with pride, he broke into a barely visible smile and raised his head.

One of them has cheated, he thought. The whole game is crooked, has been crooked for a long time. The game was serving someone’s interests. He looked straight ahead like a slave owner, disgusted by what he saw. I have to try and find the word, he thought, the word that once pronounced will blow it all to kingdom come, that will explode the whole point of the gang, or lance it like a blister that you only need to touch with a pin, just one word…I loathe you all, he thought. If I stood up now and started screaming, that I’d had enough, I can’t bear it any longer, they would all think something, their thoughts would be of me, and I want no more of this, I’ve had enough. I want to be free of them, alone; I want new friends. This friendship is a pain. I can’t stand it any more.

He looked up almost as if begging.

We shouldn’t have close friendships, he thought. It’s not my fault. I didn’t ask anyone to be my friend.

He raised his hand and they all looked him right in the eyes. Ernõ’s eyes shone with a cold and mocking light. They all hate me, he thought and a hot wave of contrariness ran through him.

He stood up and stretched sensuously.

Come on, he said simply, I’ve had enough.

THEY MADE THEIR WAY THROUGH THE CAFÉ, Tibor at the head, three of them in a single group behind, Lajos bringing up the rear. The bon vivant bowed to the director. People watched them leave. Friends of Amadé, they said at one of the tables. Sniggering laughter followed them out, looks of curiosity. Ábel felt himself blushing. All the tables were talking about them. They stood at the revolving doors. The door was temporarily jammed: someone was pushing the opposite way. There were eyes everywhere. Perhaps books were better after all. They should have stuck to books: people caused you pain, they infected you. I’d never have believed it could hurt so much. I know I’ve been a burden to him. He’s far more stupid than I am. More stupid? What does that mean? He doesn’t feel the excitement I feel when I meet someone, when I search through my memories to locate a voice I once heard. Father will be asleep now. Etelka might be awake, she may be sitting in my room. She loves me. Ernõ told me she was in love with me. What was the cobbler saying about Tibor’s mother? There was no deterioration in her condition overnight. If she should die tonight the colonel would arrive the next day or the day after…I must speak to Havas. Why did he call me as well? We will ask him to hand back the silver and we’ll give him a signed note to promise that, should we survive and grow to be adults, we will settle the debt. I’ll write him a letter and after I’m dead he can give it to Father or to Etelka. Six months or so and I will have forgotten all this. Perhaps I will still be alive and might, one day, write something. That hurts too, but not as much as living with other people does. Here we stand now with everyone staring at us. They look contemptuous: the editor is looking at us, waving us over. Perhaps they know Amadé is waiting for us. There is something disgraceful about going around with Amadé. They don’t like Amadé. They smirk when they see him and whisper when his back is turned. Now they’re smirking at us too. Perhaps they think we are off to the brothel. That’s something of a tradition here. Amadé would lead us. That wouldn’t be too bad, actually. Big Jurák, the bodybuilder, visited the brothel last week and said they had a new blond girl down from the capital, and that she showed him her license in which the police specify what streets they may use for soliciting, where they may smile and invite men over, how at the opera and at the National Theater they may only enter the second circle, and how much of the licensed girl’s income may be deducted by the landlord for rent. That would make good reading. One should read everything, everything people have written, and see everything they have built and constructed, everything. Some time, perhaps quite soon, I want to write down all I’ve ever seen or heard, write it down in a great big book, yes, including everything about this town, Tibor, Amadé, Etelka, and them all; everything I see and hear right up to the beginning of my book. Not a bad thing to do. What’s up now? Why aren’t we moving? Tibor hates me. Ernõ hates me too. I think we all hate each other. I loathe Amadé and Lajos gets on my nerves with his stupid questions. He changes subjects all the time without any warning. He gets the wrong idea about everything. I don’t want Tibor to hate me. I know he’s stupid but I still don’t want it. I’m utterly unlike him, and yet his beauty sets him apart. He can’t help it that I suffer on his account. If Tibor were my friend I’d go away with him and take great care to discuss everything with him, even if I knew he didn’t understand or wasn’t so much as listening. Perhaps he would help me if I gave him a present, something special. I’ve more or less poured out my heart to him. I have nothing I can give him. What would he say if I told him he was beautiful? Maybe he doesn’t know. I didn’t know it till recently. I must forget the fact that he’s beautiful, and once I do that I’ll be free of them. Everyone can go his own way and we can forget each other. I should pay a visit to the brothel. If I knew, if everything worked out…Perhaps Amadé will take me there now. Get a move on. The prima donna is looking this way too, laughing and beckoning. Maybe she fancies Tibor. What to do if Amadé should introduce us to the prima donna? Tomorrow is free. Everyone finds Tibor attractive. There was an army major in the street yesterday who turned round to look at Tibor. Everyone likes him. Nobody likes me…Well, maybe Etelka. It isn’t good for a person to love somebody. I shall be alone soon. I feel ill in the afternoons. I must find out who cheated. I must be free of Amadé. And of Ernõ and Havas too. I don’t want to dream about him any more. I must be free of Tibor as well. When does a person become an adult? The revolving door turned. They stepped out into the street.

THE SQUARE SPREAD OUT BEFORE THEM, FESTIVELY lit with a thick patina of moonlight, the white walls of a few wide and squat baroque houses swelling and sparkling like the icing on a cake. The music whose rhythm had been swept with them through the revolving doors dissolved and faded in the solemn silence. The church formed one end of the square, oppressing the nearby low houses with its enormous weight. A light was burning behind one of the great casement windows of the bishop’s palace. The chestnut trees around the dried-up fountain in the small park in the middle of the square raised their compact little candles.

The air was mild, as heady as on a summer night. There was not a soul to be seen anywhere. The theater, with its high stage loft and graceless proportions, rose above the park like an abandoned barn, its dark, cobwebbed windows squinting out, half-blind. The town was in the deep first phase of sleep. A train gave a piercing whistle somewhere near the station, as if to remind the populace that it was all very well sleeping and burying your head in the duvet, trains would continue to come and go with their freight of silent passengers. The town was clearly indifferent to such reminders. Before the barracks two hard-helmeted guards went on switching posts at the gate.

The bishop sat by the lighted window in a high-backed armchair reading the paper. A glass of water and a box containing a wafer with antipyrine stood on a little table next to him. Occasionally he extended his bony hand towards the glass and wet his lips with a tiny gulp, then read on distractedly. The bishop slept in an iron camp bed, like the kaiser. Above the simple bed hung an ivory crucifix; by the wall a maroon-colored velvet hassock. The drapes of the window were of the same heavy maroon velvet. The bishop was a poor sleeper. He went to look for a book in one of the bookcases, running his bony finger along the gilt-lettered spines as if touching the keys of an organ, seeking for a note perfectly fitted to the moment. He tipped a number of volumes forward, then pushed them all back, picking out instead a thick black tome that took some effort to lift. The fragile figure took some time conveying the heavy volume to his bedside table, set it down beside the breviary and the prayer beads, opened it, and examined a few illustrations. The book was by Brehm, about the lives of the animals. The bishop was very old. He sat down on the edge of the iron bed with a soft groan and, with a great sigh, removed his buttoned shoes.

Every window of the hospital was lit: it was like a busy, prosperous factory on an industrial estate where work continued through the night. And at the end of the street, under the bridge, the great steam mill was still pumping. They made their slow way across the square, drawing enormous shadows behind them in the bright light. They stopped in the middle of the park where the harsh raw smell of elder from somewhere in the bushes assaulted their senses: it was as if it were physically touching them. They lit cigarettes and stood quietly, without speaking. That sprinkling of houses, lacquered by the yellow light, had been the backdrop to the theater of their childhood. They knew precisely who lived in which house; they knew the sleepers behind the windows. The gilt lettering on the bookseller’s sign had worn away. It was in these shops with their low doors that they had bought pencils, books, collars, hats, sweets, fretsaws, battery-powered flashlights, all on their fathers’ accounts, please chalk it up. They never had to pay for anything here, their fathers enjoyed apparently boundless credit, for it seemed to extend throughout their childhood. Behind the lowered blinds of the chemist’s window, through a small square-shaped aperture, a sharp beam of light showed the chemist to be awake, probably with company, ladies from the officers’ quarters, a few officers, whiling away the small hours with a little cognac médicinal. The striking of the clock broke the silence so violently the air was still ringing with its music after it had stopped, as if someone had smashed a very delicate glass. They stood around the elder tree, a cigarette in one hand, the other arranging their clothes as they proceeded about their business. The one-armed one stuck his cigarette between his lips, his hand being required elsewhere.

Tibor started whistling quietly. They walked beside the railings on soft, frail grass. The cobbler was sitting beside a taper in his little hovel, an illustrated almanac in his lap, reading the lives of the generals in a gentle undertone, syllable by syllable. From time to time he stopped reading, looked straight ahead of him, and ran his hand through his beard, moaning quietly. In the civic library, among its thirty thousand volumes, on the moonlit floor of the great hall, the rats were excitedly feasting. The old town had been infested by rats and a rat-catcher was summoned by the council. He locked himself in the theater for a few hours and by the time he had finished there were hundreds of dead rats lying on the stage, in the auditorium, and along the corridors. Ábel could remember the rat-catcher who spent a mere afternoon in town, ridding the main public buildings of rats and mice, then disappeared along with his secrets and the council fee. Someone said he was Italian.

A GOOD SPRING MOON TENDS TO MAGNIFY WHATEVER it illuminates. It would be very hard to give a proper scientific explanation for this. All objects—houses, public squares, whole towns—puff themselves up with spring moonlight, swelling and bloating like corpses in the river. The river dragged such corpses through town at a run. The corpses swam naked and traveled great distances down from the mountains, down tiny tributaries that flowed into others greater than themselves in the complex system of connections; they floated rapidly down on the spring flood heading towards their ultimate terminus, the sea. The dead were fast swimmers. Sometimes they kept company, arriving in twos and threes, racing each other through town at night; the river being aware of its obligations to the town, going about its business of transporting the dead at night with the utmost speed. The corpse-swimmers had come a long way and spent the winter hibernating under the frozen river until the melting ice in the spring allowed them to continue down the flood towards the plains. There were many of them and they had been there some time. Their toes and bellies protruded from the water, their heads a few inches under the mirroring surface, the wounds on their bodies, their heads, and their chests, growing ever wider. Sometimes they got caught up on the footings of the bridge where millers fished them out the next morning, examining with curiosity the official death certificates enclosed in waterproof tin capsules hung about their necks. There must have been a lot of them because they kept turning up, every week all through spring. If they happened to wind up in town, the editor of the local paper would publish whatever details the millers had managed to glean from the capsules.

The pine woods surrounding the town had been devastated by a storm at the beginning of the war, but the spring wind still wafted the smell of resin into town, and on warm nights it blended with the air to produce an atmosphere thick like pine-scented bath salts. At the corner of fishmongers’ alley the butcher and his two daughters slept in a single cubicle, the door to the premises left open, the moonlight lying across the sleeping bodies, and all along the wall the great swelling animal carcasses hanging on hooks. On the marble counter lay a calf’s head, its eyes closed, black blood dripping from its nostrils onto the slab. The old solicitor who was the last in town to go to bed each night sat in his study in a cherrywood armchair, the scarlet broadcloth of which was secured at the edges with a speckling of white enameled tacks. He had a clutch of dusty glass cases on his lap and was examining his butterfly collection. Several thousand butterflies lined the walls in similar glass cases, the solicitor himself having captured them with his white butterfly net and put them in a stoppered bottle of potassium cyanide. He carried the cyanide bottle and the butterfly net around with him everywhere, in the back pocket of his long frock coat, into chambers, and into courtrooms too. He had lost two sons in the war. Their photographs stood on his desk in copper frames tied round with black ribbons of mourning. But he did not mourn for them any more because he was old, because it was already two years since they were killed, and because in two years a person can get over everything painful. He was currently examining a row of Cabbage Whites through his magnifying glass, taking great care over the process. A tobacco sieve lay on the table, and a stump pipe. The solicitor had been a lepidopterist for seventy years now: you could see him in the warm seasons of each year at the edge of town, his white beard swaying, the long tails of his frock coat floating behind him as he skipped over furrowed fields holding his net aloft, chasing butterflies.

And there were many others, many thousands of people they knew by sight, by their faces or voices, recalling them all in whatever place the soul develops its photographs, nor could they free themselves of them, the faces of those beggars, priests, and fading women with whom they lived among these pieces of stage scenery, where all who found themselves in the area and remained here through ties of family or work made up a single community whose members knew everything and nothing about each other. But in the moment of their dying perhaps there would flash before them the face of the crippled toy-shop owner in the square by the church who had once explained a new sort of conjuring trick involving a magic cupboard. And indeed there was a professional conjurer in town too who performed every autumn in the culture hall and tuned pianos in his spare time. They were inhabitants of an island from which it was impossible to escape entirely, for when they died the family would bring their remains back and bury them in their native island soil. Ábel threw his cigarette away.

Avanti, pronounced the actor in a flat voice. He was standing at the stage door, his gold tooth glittering in the moonlight. He was smirking.

HE POINTED HIS BATTERY-POWERED FLASHLIGHT at the top of the stairs, then ran it inquiringly up the wall where, behind a barred window, hung a notice saying: 9:30. Rigoletto. Rehearsal without script. The actor led them on tiptoe and having reached the mezzanine threw wide the iron door.

The long corridor was so narrow that feeling their way forward they could touch its facing walls. They proceeded like this in uncertain crocodile fashion, swaying a little, the actor in front almost floating on light feet as he flashed their single source of light first ahead, then behind him. The inside of this theater, as of any other, seemed all stairs and doors. A sweet, musty smell permeated everything, something not quite perfume, damp, or mastic, but a blend of canvas, paint, ninety-proof alcohol, human body odors, dust, dirt, stuffiness, and more than anything that unique theater stench that is a distillation of grand speeches and tirades, stuck together with words, colored lights, and movement, an intensely physical, bombastic stench that clings to actors’ clothes and skin and hair, one you can smell even when they’re not on stage. For the first time Ábel understood the actor’s peculiar need of different, much harsher, broader forms of scent. It was the smell of the stage the actor was trying to mask, for no one likes to smell of work, that was why kitchen maids used patchouli, cobblers crude pomade, greengrocers musk, and why the actor used chypre.

They had never imagined a building with so many corridors. So many stairs, so many doors. They climbed two floors, the actor pushing past ever more iron doors that creaked or swung sharply back at them. The actor was quietly whistling. He was a long way ahead of them with the flashlight. He was whistling a sweet tune in a broken, recurring rhythm. Finally he stopped at a door with a frosted glass panel.

“This is the hairdresser’s room!” he announced as he switched on the light. “Sit down.”

A bench ran along the wall and one corner of the room was curtained off with a red-and-white striped cloth hanging from the ceiling. A full-length streaky mirror lay on a crude table by a stool. Say hello to the hairdresser! With one hand he drew the curtain aside. Hundreds of human hairpieces hung on long poles beside the wall: blond, brown, gray and curly, wavy and smooth, with all the unspeakable sadness of objects devoid of function. Something of a person remains in hair, even after it has been cut off. A blond female wig with two long plaits dangled in the corner, keeping an eye on the maiden who had relieved herself of it, vainly seeking the shoulder the plaits should be winding over. The black mane that flowed round the neck of the rebel hero was not flowing anywhere, the long fringe falling over the vanished brow in a state of terminal despair beyond all reason. On either side of a bald smoothly peeled scalp some scant white locks covered a pair of old man’s ears that must have heard much in their time but were craftily keeping their secrets to themselves. Every hairpiece retained something of the personality of the man or woman from whose head it had been plucked. Hundreds upon hundreds of invisible hanged figures dangled from their hairpieces. They suggested some ancient massacre of hair growers arranged by that most potent of hangmen, time.

“The hairdresser is possessed of supernatural powers,” said the actor. “He has something of a force of nature about him.”

He paused for breath. “Only he is much more skillful,” he added.

He sat down in front of the mirror and examined himself closely.

“There are wigs that more or less play themselves,” he said, pulling open a drawer. “This blond one here…how often he has done my work for me.”

With one violent gesture he tore off his own wig. The action was so sudden, the effect so dramatic they all involuntarily leaned forward on the bench where they had been sitting, huddled and enchanted. Tibor’s hands flew to his mouth. They knew the actor himself wore a wig. They knew he changed its color to chime with the passing seasons. There were times it was of a light, dreamlike blondness, sometimes red as fire, at other times pure black. But the movement with which he removed the wig racked them with a sympathetic pain, they could not have been more surprised had the actor with equal suddenness torn off his arm and begun to unscrew his head. The actor’s scalp appeared from beneath the wig like a brilliantly waxed snow-white dome that had bubbled into startling view. There was something so naked about the bald head, so physical, so undressed, exposed, and shameless it was as if the actor had ripped off all his clothes with a single movement, cast them on the ground, and stood before them without a stitch. He ran his hand over his bare head, leaned indifferently over to the mirror, and started to examine it with proper professional attention.

You have to be careful, he said, and drew the blond wig over his knuckles, gently stroking its locks with the other hand, careful you don’t get water on the hair. That’s vital. You’re still young so I am telling you this. Unfortunately no one told me until it was too late. There are people who duck under the waves, then try to scrub their hair with soap. It’s the most dreadful carelessness anyone can be guilty of. There are others who dip their heads in water after washing. The scalp develops dandruff, the hair dries out, grows pale, and breaks. Never let water come into contact with your hair. There are excellent special washes and dry shampoos…One moment! He leaned even closer to the mirror, eyes blinking as he studied his face.

There was a strange indifference, a lifelessness about his face as he sat bare-skulled before the mirror. Only his eyes were alive, every other feature dropped into a mask of death, as if, having ripped off his wig and revealed himself naked, the actor had wiped from his face every mark that time and life had posted there, all expression, every crow’s-foot of individuality: he was naked now, empty and dead, mere matter with which he could work as he wanted. Grasping his nose between two fingers he turned his head this way and that, like a foreign object. It was a stranger they saw sitting in front of them, mere raw material that its proprietor could shape as he liked. He rubbed his face with infinite care as if he were alone. He pulled his lids down, rolled his eyes, covered his ample jowls with his hands, and like a painter in the middle of a portrait leaned back in his chair and examined himself through half-closed lids.

“I have approximately thirty-four faces,” he mentioned as if in passing. “Thirty-four, or it may be thirty-six, it’s a long time since I counted them. I can do a Negro priest, darlings…I have a Cyrano. I have a Caesar that is without a wig, genuinely bald, it only needs two lines here by the mouth…Watch!”

He picked up a stick of charcoal and drew two lines by his cheekbones. His face looked markedly thinner. Every aspect of his face suddenly assumed a sharp angular look, somehow cruel, and his baldness took on a life of its own, like some symbol of fate, such a clear mark of a man’s secret suffering that no amount of successes, victories, or triumphs could compensate for it.

“My Caesar does not wear a laurel crown,” he said. “He thrusts his shame in your face. Let them note it and tremble. The fate of entire worlds is contained in this bald head.”

Slowly he settled the blond wig over it.

“And here we discover the problem of whether to be or not to be.”

He paraded before them, bowing from the waist.

“And I tell you, Polonius…”

He stared before him in his Hamlet frenzy. He pulled one lock of blond hair over his brow, pouted and took a few trance-like steps. Now he was someone whose part he did not know: a man who had once passed him in the street of whom all he could retain was his supercilious smile.

“He has been me in various parts,” he said meditatively. He sat back down in front of the mirror and removed the wig so he was bald again. He dragged half a dozen wigs out of the drawer, threw them on the table, trying first one then the other. He stuck a little goatee under his chin and sideburns on his cheekbones, and coughing and puffing with gout raised his foot, put on a faint voice, and ordered hot wine. He toyed with faces and patches of hair as if taking them from a mold. He brought the well-known features of the long dead to life without even seeming to try employing a few vocal modulations, all immediately identifiable. Then he pushed all the props to the side.

“Perhaps, one day,” he said, “I will discover a mask that I can use for a long time, for the rest of my life. It’s not so easy. Shreds, patches, hair, and paint are of little help. This stuff here,” he tapped his face with two fingers, “is pliable material, but you have to know how to use it. Naturally, it shrivels and hardens. Flesh has a life of its own, my friends, as has the soul. You have to command it, tame it. This body of mine,” he cast his eyes over his entire length and gestured dismissively, “is all used up and I’m bored with it. I want to appear in public in another town next time, in different outward form. Like a ruddy-cheeked youth, perhaps. But I can’t. Maybe I will go away and become an old man, the wrinkles that much more firmly set, more intractable. I am aging.”

Frustrated, he slapped at his double chin.

“Here’s one I really like,” he said, drawing forth a scrap of hair. “And this. And this,” he threw the wigs up in the air. “Believe me, if I were to put on this scarlet head of Titus no one would know me.”

And he put on the Titus head. The shimmering copper locks flopped over his brow right down to the bridge of his nose. With a few delicate touches he applied rouge to his lips until they looked young and full, emphasized his eyes with a matchstick, and suddenly the lifeless pupils were full of light. His face was radiant, red, alive with sin, full of shameless arrogance. His voice too had changed. He spoke in the resounding tone of command.

“I have thirty-four faces,” he shouted and blew out his cheeks. “Or is it thirty-six? Who can recognize me? I shall disappear, like the invisible man, I shall slip between people’s fingers. My realm is the world of immortals because I slip between death’s fingers too. He won’t know my face. Even if I am alone he won’t find the real me at home.”

He hesitated, looked around, and dropped his voice.

“Everyone has many faces. Sometimes I no longer know which is the last one, the one under which there is nothing but bone.”

He peeled off the Titus head and wiped the paint from his face with a napkin. Once more he fell to examining the raw material and relapsed into depression.

“Can this fat, toothless pig be me? Nonsense. The devil take it and consign it to hell.”

He removed his dentures and shoved them aside next to his hair as though they had nothing to do with him, then he wiped them clean with a cloth and carefully put them back in his mouth.

Ernõ stood and crept up behind him. The actor looked for a cigarette, threw a towel around his neck, and, cigarette in mouth, examined himself suspiciously. With an unexpected movement he twisted the towel tightly around his neck.

“In Paris,” he said, “this is how the waiters sit and dine after they have finished their shifts. They twist their napkins into a rope and wrap them round their necks like scarves.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” said Ábel.

They soon forgot everything else. There was a reason the actor was with them tonight. He was preparing something that was bigger and more amusing than the idiotic postgraduation larks that usually ended in drunken fistfights at the brothel. They could rely on the actor. They were enchanted by his transformations. Lajos watched him with fascination as he fussed with wigs, face paints, patches, and boxes of rice powder. Ábel was wondering whether the actor had a hidden face that he himself might not have seen, one that he would put on just for tonight. He remembered that half minute or so when the actor had remained alone in his room by the window. A cold shiver ran down his spine, but he knew that he could not leave the room now, not for any price. He would see this last night through with the gang and the actor and would not move until the actor discarded his final mask. The way he sat in front of the mirror now, with the napkin around his neck, unshaven, bald, a cigarette in his mouth, his legs crossed, his hands carelessly on his hips, he looked entirely foreign, like someone who spoke a strange language, practiced a mysterious trade. You couldn’t tell where he came from, what skills he possessed, or what he was doing here at all. He sat back, he drew on his cigarette, he dangled his feet. He was a complete stranger. So unfamiliar was he that they felt shy and fell silent. This was entirely the actor’s territory. All those hairpieces by the wall, all those destinies and personalities hanging in the shadows, all were part of his domain. At one gesture of his, whole armies might come to life, figures with terrifying faces might emerge. The actor gave a haughty, confident, self-satisfied smile. The cigarette butt shifted from one corner of his mouth to the other.

Ernõ alone harbored reservations.

“What are you up to?” he asked in a flat voice.

The actor threw the cigarette butt away. “Now to business,” he said and sprang to his feet.

HE SAT ÁBEL DOWN AT THE MIRROR, LEANED back, crossed his arms, one finger to his lips, and examined him carefully. He went over to the window, leaned against the sill, and thought about it a little more. He indicated with a gesture, as a painter might, that Ábel should turn his profile towards him. Then, finally having solved the problem, he leapt over to the table, tore off a tuft of black hemp and held it next to Ábel’s face, shook his head, gave a whistle, and with two fingers turned the boy’s head this way and that in a deeply contemplative mood, sighing aah every so often.

“You ask what I’m up to,” he chattered, vaguely distracted. “I’m coming to grips with things, preparing a little party. We do what we can!”

He picked out a grayish wig with a side parting and ran a brush through it.

“You have aged, my child. You have distinctly aged recently. Suffering adds years.”

He carefully brushed the wig into a center parting.

“I thought it might be appropriate as a kind of valedictory gesture,” he said. “We could, of course, go and visit the girls too. Or make our way over to the Petõfi café.”

He wound a little cotton wool round the end of a match and looked for some glasses.

“Now face the mirror. I’m beginning to see what you will look like in thirty years’ time. Remember me then.”

With a sudden movement he clapped the wig onto Ábel’s head the way a hypnotist might put to sleep some volunteer from the audience using no more than a simple hand gesture. Ábel was immediately transformed. An old man stared back at him and the rest of the gang from the mirror. Aged brows clouded over startled eyes. The actor began to attend to the eye region with his stick of charcoal.

“What I’ve imagined is a little celebration…a celebration of us all that you won’t forget. We did once talk of appearing on stage together in full costume, and everyone would say whatever came into his head. A kind of show for art lovers only…with everyone taking responsibility for himself. We’ll give them a proper show all right.”

So saying he stuck a small graying goatee on Ábel’s chin, tore it off again, and tried muttonchop whiskers instead.

“The moment is here. You can have the run of the entire costume cupboard. We have the stage complete with scenery. The auditorium is empty. We are performing only for ourselves. I have ensured that we will be left in peace till the morning.”

He gave a smile of mild amusement. He settled on the muttonchops and stuck two gray streaks of hair next to the ears. The sweet smell of mastic filled the room.

“Well, one could do worse,” he said examining his work on Ábel with satisfaction. “The lips are narrow…let’s add a little disappointment. And some doubt. And here…do excuse me, darling, I’m almost done…a little pride, a little canniness.”

Each time his hand moved Ábel changed a little more, becoming ever less recognizable. They stood behind him and watched.

“It’s not magic, it’s not witchcraft,” the actor declared as with a few very rapid strokes of the brush and the charcoal he emphasized one or two features and blurred some sharp lines.

“We haven’t sold our souls to the devil…”

He ran a brush right through the eyebrows.

“It’s just manual skill and expertise. Wind the clock forward thirty years and…here we are!”

He stuck the towel under his arm and the comb by his ear and made a great bow, like Figaro in the opera.

“My compliments to you, gentlemen. Next please.”

Ábel stood up uncertainly. The little circle behind him backed away. The actor was already considering Ernõ.

“Cold heart, green bile,” he chanted. “Sting of conspirator, serpent’s tongue, you can already see the vague trace of a hump on his back. You will always be freckled.”

He pressed Ernõ into the chair in front of the mirror. Ábel stood in a corner, his arms folded. He felt a great calm. He was wearing a mask and that was reassuring. A man could live behind a mask and think what he liked. Tibor watched him with a superior smile. They laughed and surrounded him, the one-armed one sniffing curiously at Ábel, taking a tour of him. The mask looked solid and reliable. Tibor stared at him with round eyes. Ábel laughed and he could see from his friends’ faces that his laugh had changed too: they were looking at him with serious expressions, with genuine admiration.

“Let us hurry nature on a bit,” said the actor, who was giving his full attention to Ernõ now. “Let us correct her. That’s all it is. I merely bring out what is mature in you,” he said, fitting a red wig on Ernõ’s head. “If he looks like an adult, well, let him be an adult,” and so saying he covered the freckled band above Ernõ’s upper lip with a deep-red mustache.

“Let him bear the consequences of his adulthood. The brush in a master’s hand is led by instinct, but he has his three advisers: Learning, Observation, and Experience. You are a hunchback, I tell you.” With both hands he seized Ernõ’s temples, bent his head back, and stared deep into his eyes.

“The head of a monster. I shall now strip you of your skin and replace it with a new one, the shed skin of a snake.” He pressed down Ernõ’s eyelids with his thumbs and gave the rest of the gang a wink in the mirror.

AS ONE AFTER ANOTHER THE ACTORS RETIRED TO the “dressing room,” they examined each other suspiciously, but not one stood in front of the mirror. It is extraordinary how quickly people get used to their new appearances. It was a shame the costumes didn’t quite fit them: some were too big and their hands and feet were lost in the folds of their garments. But within a few moments they had grown taller and fatter. Ernõ stood at the table, leaning on his stick. His sharp hump rose under his ample old-fashioned cloak; his red hair fell in straggly locks across his brow from beneath his tall top hat; his old-fashioned frock coat and silk knee breeches hung awkwardly on his thin frame. Next to his nose a thick, hairy wart sprouted. His heavily ringed tiny eyes danced nervously, blending confusion, resentment, and obstinacy, and his mouth was twisted into a bitter grimace of suffering.

“Life has taught me to prize truth, the truth above all,” said Ábel, his voice low and severe.

“Button your trousers,” replied Ernõ.

They had dressed somewhat carelessly in their hurry. Ábel drew the red robe close around him. Béla, a half-naked Spanish sailor with a headscarf and locks flirtatiously plastered next to his ears, sat on the windowsill, hands on hips. The one-armed one was lost in the folds of his toga. He sat on the table, dangling his bare sandaled feet, a band round his head. He stared straight ahead, with a haughty, wounded look, and the pride of Mucius Scaevola who had sacrificed one arm for the state but had his own independent opinion on everything.

“To me, Rome is…,” he was saying.

They paced restlessly up and down in their narrow cage. They were puzzling out their as yet unknown roles and trying hard not to notice Tibor.

Colonel Prockauer’s son was leaning into the mirror, as charmed by what he saw there as Narcissus had once been. Two long blond bunches of hair hung in front of his shoulders, the high-waisted silk dress tight around him as he raised the long loose train skirt with one hand and crossed his silk-stockinged legs with their lacquer-shod feet. Under the deep décolletage his well-formed breasts, created by the actor out of two towels, heaved and rose with each breath he took. His arms, his neck, and chest were sticky with thick white powder. The actor’s fingers had magically elongated his eyelashes, and his adolescent spots were masked by a pink blusher the actor had gently brushed and puffed across his cheeks.

You couldn’t really tell, not at a glance anyway, whether he was woman or girl. Ernõ circled him warily, raising his top hat and muttering incomprehensible compliments to him. Tibor responded with a smile, then immediately turned back to re-enter the spell of the mirror. He tried a few steps, holding his skirt high. The wig was hot and smelled foul.

“I’m sweating like a pig,” he declared in a deep voice that was not his own.

Ernõ offered his arm. The one-armed one cut in.

“I have only one arm, sweet damsel,” he said, “but it is strong and you can cling to it.”

Ábel opened the window. Hot air poured in along with the heavy milky scent of earth. They stood silently, the open window reminding them of reality, of the houses in the square, and of people who might be spying on them from afar. They looked at each other and couldn’t bring themselves to laugh. They were overwhelmed by the consciousness of their utter complicity, the tremulous joy of belonging, the delight of pulling a huge ridiculous face at the sleeping world, behind its unsuspecting back, perhaps for the last time. For the last time perhaps the actor held together the ropes that bound them. Their shared memories, the spirit of rebellion, everything that united them: their common hatred of a world as incomprehensible and unlikely as their own, as ignorant of itself and as false, all flashed before their eyes. And the ties of friendship too: its anxieties and longings, the sad effects of such anxiety still evident in their eyes. Tibor raised his skirt and spun round, astonished at himself.

“You know,” he said in genuine surprise, “a skirt is not really as uncomfortable as you’d think.”

A sailor entered the room, a fat man whose stomach bulged beneath his striped sleeveless vest, over his wide blue canvas trousers, his shoes of Muscovy leather, and blocked the doorway with his girth. A pipe dangled from his lips and his waxed hair, brushed forward under his loose-fitting cap, was plastered greasily across his forehead. He was squinting. He stood there awkwardly, took the pipe out of his mouth, and waved to them to follow him, then turned off the light.

HE CLUNKED ABOUT ON THE ECHOING BOARDS in his noisy shoes and turned on the spots. Light exploded in their eyes, both from below and from the side, and behind the light a deep dense darkness bulged towards them, the impenetrable cavernous darkness of the auditorium accompanied by the funereal mothball smell of canvas sheeting. The actor went here and there, entirely at home, an engineer attending to business, barely noticing them, operating handles, checking resistors, subtly, fascinatingly, modifying the light until eventually it was all concentrated in one area of the stage, merging in a pool of heat and color, a gentle glow at the edges of which ends of ropes, canvases, lighting boards, and stage flats faded into the murk. He tugged one rope and a clutch of other ropes collapsed towards him, of which he grabbed one. Enormous colored sails turned slowly with lazy flaps while the sailor, pipe in mouth again, set about the ropes and colored sails in preparation for the coming storm. A wide terrace complete with palms and steps leading up to it descended before them, blocking their view, and some faded rose bowers followed, swirling with dust. Wait for the storm, the sailor muttered indifferently, then hurried off into the wings, setting a distant wind to screech and whinny through the bowers. A few harsh claps of thunder rang out over the howling storm. The actor solemnly stepped out from behind a dusty cactus, rubbed his hands, lit his pipe, and looked about him shaking his head.

“I don’t think this is quite right either,” he said, and waved away the Riviera scene. “Stand center stage, would you?”

The scenery swam aloft, disappearing in the heights, and the rose bowers jealously followed the sunlit landscape. Plain white walls appeared as if from nowhere. The conjurer threw his rope up towards the ceiling and the stage miraculously narrowed. Suddenly they found themselves prisoners in the cabin of a ship. Behind portholes the wind was still buzzing, but was now joined by the slap of waves. Two low lights appeared in the wall and a narrow door opened beside one of the portholes. A lamp with a faded shade dropped like a stone from above. The sailor dragged at a knot of ropes with both hands and a rhomboid ceiling lowered over the cabin. The shaded lamp came on. Then they were all working, the only sounds being the actor’s brief words of command and the wailing of the wind that Ábel now controlled. It did not take as much skill to whip up a storm as people tended to think. A single movement was enough to induct Ábel into the secret.

“Drive them on, Aeolus!” he said as he pushed a claw-footed table center stage. “You are master of the four great planetary winds.”

It was a surprisingly easy task mastering the four great planetary winds. The one-armed one rolled a barrel up against the wall. They carried sea chests, most probably containing ship biscuits and water. Aeolus whipped his servants on, their painful howling extending over the ocean.

“All hands on deck!” the actor bellowed. “Ladies first! The sea chests go round the table. Secure the portholes!”

He stopped.

“One time the Negroes leapt into the sea…,” he began. “No, I’ve already told you that.”

He kicked a rosebush left over from the previous scene through the cabin door. Loud thunder shook the air, the boards trembled under their feet. Ábel was laying the storm on mercilessly.

“That was a close one,” the actor pronounced after the latest bolt, and spat. “Take a breather, Aeolus. Relax a moment.”

There was a strange silence. The lights, the walls, the furniture, everything was in its place, unlikely yet unmistakable, so that Ábel’s entrance was a little unsteady, his steps uncertain, counterbalancing the swell of the sea. With the minimum fuss they took control of their new realm. Ernõ made a formal gesture of taking Tibor by the hand and ceremoniously leading him over to the table. The one-armed one stood on the barrel, absorbed in watching the storm with its roof-high waves through a porthole. Ábel clapped an arm round his shoulder.

“A sublime scene,” he said with awe. “One cannot help but feel one’s insignificance.”

A trapdoor opened in the floor and a tray laden with glasses rose through it, the naked arm of the actor supporting it and rising with it until his head appeared. He made a formal show of climbing through, then let the trapdoor clap shut behind him. He raised the tray high in the air and, leaning forward at a sharp angle, moved around with all the weathered skill of a ship’s waiter in a storm, his body seeming to collapse after the tray with its glasses that he eventually deposited unbroken on the table.

“The two most important things,” he gasped, “alcohol and a cool head. There are people who panic in a storm: some lose their heads, others the contents of their stomachs. We are making eight knots full speed, the temperature is falling. One good draught of brandy, gentlemen, a mouthful of ship biscuit, a bit of refrigerated meat, and we feel readier to face the following hours with equanimity. The captain is at his post and the passengers are inclined to trust him.”

The tray was piled high with ship biscuits covered with meat and flasks of water-colored brandy. The actor gave a modest smile. He sat down, tapped his pipe against the tabletop, adjusted his belt, and stuffed a great hunk of meat into his mouth.

“Creation is hungry work,” he said. He wiped the rim of the bottle with his hand and took a long draught.

“Burns your mouth!” He turned to Tibor. “A snifter for you, my lovely incognito?”

THE LOVELY INCOGNITO ADMITTED THAT AFTER the first glass she felt like throwing up. The actor knew a cure for seasickness that you should take an hour before the storm set in. They laid the lady out across the chest, fanned her, and tried to entertain her. The cabin darkened somewhat. The cabin boy left them every five minutes to increase the roar of the four winds and to provide a weather report.

Danger draws people together. No longer sturdy and Spartan, the actor fell ravenously to eating and drinking. He was the first to wilt. They had never seen him so drunk. Ernõ, who drank cautiously, taking little sips, kept an eye on him as he wasn’t convinced the actor was genuinely drunk. The actor meanwhile pulled a barrel up to the porthole, sat down on it, and stretching his arms wide pretended to play an accordion while singing in a harsh nasal tone.

“The Negroes sang this one,” he remarked. “That was before they leapt into the water.”

The monotonous melancholy air swirled and faded in the high auditorium. The actor rose to his feet and tirelessly continuing to play on the imaginary accordion walked up and down, undergoing a curious series of meta-morphoses. He sang and played, but a few minutes later seemed to have vanished to be replaced by a fat drunk sailor sitting on the edge of the table, this time with a real accordion, his song full of the sadness of docks, harbors, and stagnant water, his face quite transformed, his eyes asquint, awkward in body, good-tempered, with a brandy-sodden joviality, somehow ponderous. He hadn’t actually done anything, merely transformed himself. They couldn’t understand what he was saying as he mixed words from English, Spanish, and other languages unknown to them, in a kind of incomprehensible macaronic, then he gave a croak and fell to praising distant skies and climes while radiating regret for years of pointless roaming.

The actor certainly knew his trade. It was a fat, drunk sailor that sat at the edge of the stage singing into the dark auditorium. The rest of them wandered up and down behind him, humming along with the hypnotic rhythm while the storm continued unabated outside and the vessel with all its passengers lurched towards an unknown harbor. The heady smell of brandy floated through the cabin as the sense of danger and a mood of mutual reliance took hold of them. In any case, there was going to be no escaping each other’s company until the ship was safely docked. Tibor was feeling better and fell to eating with an appetite that belied his seeming sex. Béla was sitting at the actor’s feet, his chin propped on his palms, observing him. They waltzed round each other, the actor setting the rhythm for the dance, his voice overflowing with melancholy.

It was the first time any of them had set foot on stage. The strange thing was that they felt perfectly at home there. They took possession of this world composed of three walls and a few boards as if nature had intended them for it. Ábel stood by the footlights and quietly recited something for the benefit of the invisible audience. As for the actor, he was absorbed in his acting and was growing ever more remote, ever less like the figure they had known, already recalling Le Havre, relating tales of amorous nights in various harbors, gazing around him as if they were all strangers. His vast half-naked body shook with every gesture. He was no longer sucking in his stomach and his flesh bulged through his vest, and as he passed before the spotlights Ábel spotted tattoos that served as tickets, some on his arms, some on his chest.

“Beware! A man with a tattoo! Take care, I say!” the one-armed one cried out.

Ernõ was wearing his top hat. His hump weighed heavily on his back, pressing down his upper body.

“My intentions are honorable,” he said frostily. The one-armed one threw himself on Ernõ and Tibor leapt between the combatants, giving a faint shriek. Ábel had the impression that there were too many of them, too many strangers and newcomers, and miscounted their numbers. The actor was dancing in a corner, stubbornly, insistently alone, his accordion constantly moving, not to be forgotten for a second, while his heel stamped out a stiff, nervous rhythm. The gang sat down around the table and Ábel took out his pack of cards.

“I refuse to play with cheats,” the one-armed one mumbled, clearly drunk.

But the sight of the pack enticed the actor over too. He examined each card carefully, slowly appraising it, drinking, rattling his change, then getting into arguments, using strange offensive-sounding phrases. They smacked their cards down, propped themselves on their elbows, pulled a lamp closer, Béla once again offering himself to be searched. There was silence for a while. The ship was clearly in calmer waters now, the wind abated. While they were dealing the cards again the actor left the cabin to return with a fresh bottle of brandy and declared with satisfaction:

“It’s a starry night. Wind southeasterly. By morning we shall be in Piraeus.”

Ábel wanted to know how long they had been here. Even experienced sailors tend to lose track of time. But what does it matter, he thought with dizzy delight. It’s a fine ship and we’re making good progress somewhere between sky and water. We will have arrived somewhere by morning. He clambered down into the prompter’s box and watched the proceedings from there. Béla had one arm round the actor’s neck, his legs crossed, the smoldering remains of a cigarette in his mouth, his body slightly bowed as he stood, slender and boyish, with a gentle, somewhat decadent smile on his yellow face, an unconscious picture of lecherous, bovine self-satisfaction. Tibor threw off his long wig with its bunches, and Ábel was pained and surprised to note that he remained as effeminate, as girlish, and as much the ingénue without it as he had been with, his beauty spot still fixed above his upper lip, his arms still white, and his bosom still in place. He was sitting between Ernõ and the one-armed one, chin propped on two fingers, holding his cards with a feminine, grande-dame-ish, almost woman-of-the-world air. Ernõ cut him a fan from a cardboard box and Tibor employed it, fanning himself slowly and easily.

Ábel leaned on his elbows in the prompter’s box. It was more interesting watching than taking part, he thought. He felt dizzy. Only the actor seemed to behave as naturally as you might expect of someone who had spent his whole life on this very ship, wearing a striped vest, with a pipe in his mouth, never stepping out of his role, not one voice, not one glance out of place. He was scanning the company, looking for something, and when he discovered Ábel in the prompter’s box he began to protest.

“You cheat!” he bellowed in a tremendous voice. “You scoundrel! Have you no manners? You spend your time on shore observing where the tide is sweeping us! Fancy spying on others, eh? Get back to your place among the rest. Push his head under the water!”

They rushed Ábel, grabbed his arms, and dragged him from his nook. Ábel put up no resistance. He lay flat on the boards, his arms spread wide. The actor took a contemptuous tour of him, as if he regarded him as no more than a corpse. He poked at him with his toes, then turned away.

“There are people who are utterly corrupt,” he declared with plain disgust. “People addicted to the most depraved passions. But the worst of them are the voyeurs who derive their satisfaction from observing other people indulge their passions. I have always loathed them. There was a time in Rio when I smashed in the teeth of one. These are the kind of people who drill holes in walls. They are pimps, purveyors of pomade. Beware of such. People in the act itself are inevitably innocent. Sin begins the moment you leave the circle and watch from outside.”

He circled the cabin and put a bottle down next to Ábel.

“Drink!” he ordered, then slumped down at Ábel’s side as if exhausted. “Over here, Madonna!” He laid Tibor’s head in his lap with gentle paternal solicitude. The boy lay down compliantly beside him. He filled his pipe and puffed at it in the manner of an old salt or an ancient gold-miner about to tell far-fetched yarns.

“You must be very careful on board ship,” he said, nodding. “Nowhere else do people live in conditions of such ruthless servitude. And I know what I’m talking about when I say that. There was a time…what I mean to say is that you need strict discipline on board. Just imagine: year after year, locked up together like prisoners in one small cell. A sailor quickly loses his sense of all that is fine and lovely in the natural world. He is constantly under surveillance, never alone. It’s the most terrible thing that can happen to a man. Mutinies, when they occur on a ship, burst on you with a sudden fury: the men go about their ordinary jobs for years without a word of complaint, without a voice raised in anger. Should one of them express a contrary opinion he is simply booted off at the next port of call, and you can’t expect the ship’s judge and jury to see the joke. Then something happens, something utterly insignificant, and a line is crossed. This sort of thing happens with exceptional suddenness and later you can’t determine what really caused it, because it seems so very stupid: a row over a cake of soap or a drop of grog, it’s all beyond understanding.”

Béla stood at the edge of the stage laughing.

“That was the box we used to reserve!” he cried. He stretched his arms out towards the dark auditorium. “Box three on the left!” he shouted with boundless delight. “That’s where we had to sit every Sunday afternoon, our hair neatly combed, forbidden to lean on the balustrade. We wouldn’t get any sweets either because Father said people would laugh if they saw the grocer’s children sucking sweets.” He leaned forward and bellowed into the auditorium.

“My father has principles! I have none!” He was reeling with laughter. “If only he could see me here…”

“Box two was better,” said Ábel. “That was our box, number two on the right. Tibor, if only your father could see you now! Careful, your skirt is riding up.”

Tibor sat up and smoothed his skirt down. Ábel addressed him most solemnly.

“Have you ever read poems with cotton wool in your ears? Or prose, for that matter…It’s quite different, you know. You should try it some time…”

The actor fished in his pocket for a contraption that looked a little like a pocket watch and splashed perfume on his palms and cheeks. The cloud of sickening chypre enveloped Tibor too.

“A proper sailor likes his scents,” said the actor. “His pockets and his chest are full of gifts for his friends and brides.”

So saying he dipped in his pocket again and brought out a small hand-mirror, a comb, some cakes of soap, and ceremoniously handed them round. What was left of the chypre he poured all over Tibor.

THERE WERE CONTRARY STORIES AS TO WHAT happened later. Ernõ asserted that everyone, with the exception of the actor, who had in fact drunk the most, was drunk. The actor was only pretending. The one-armed one obstinately maintained that the actor was genuinely and helplessly drunk because there was that embarrassing moment when he touched him with his fingertip and the actor collapsed like a sack.

What they all remembered was that round about dawn the actor made an interminable torrent of a speech and behaved most strangely. He walked up and down waving his arms and told ridiculous stories in a mixture of languages. No one the next day could remember what he actually said. He kept mentioning the names of foreign cities, made grandiloquent gestures at the dark auditorium, and shouted obscene remarks into it. There was one time when they were all speaking at once. The one-armed one was weeping and staggering around. He went from person to person, tapping each on the arm and pointing to the space where his missing arm should have been. “There’s yours,” he said, “but where is mine?” He wept, sat down on the ground, and felt about himself. “There must be a mistake,” he pleaded. “Help me look for it. It must be here somewhere.” They stood around not knowing what to do. They tried whispering soothing things into his ear. He was impossible to console or calm. He screamed and shouted and started vomiting. They washed his face. Tibor sat down with him and laid his brother’s head in his lap. The one-armed one was twitching, his whole body racked with tears.

“More,” advised the actor. “Give him more drink. Crying is just a stage you go through. Let’s see where this leads!”

They drank straight from the bottle, the actor disappearing from time to time, returning with more bottles. He obviously had a supply at hand. Ernõ bellowed over the chaos:

“Where did you get the money?”

They stared at each other in the unexpected silence. True enough. How could he afford all this? The actor was known to be stingy with money. Now he grinned.

“You’re my friends…,” he said. “What does it matter? Think of me as your patron…” He lurched over to the prompter’s box. “Ladies and gentlemen…Behold Maecenas…patron of the arts…for my little friends…”

He reeled about, laughing.

“Let there be music!” he declared.

He pulled a gramophone from one of the trunks and with uncertain fingers put a record on.

“Hush, needle,” he cajoled. “Hush. Let’s dance.”

He stood up straight, stepped over to Tibor, and made a bow. The one-armed one scrambled to his feet.

“Look in the trunk,” he said. “The trunk.”

The record was playing so quietly that at first they did not hear it. The actor swept Tibor into his arms and began to dance with him.

Ábel followed them, somewhat ill at ease. The actor was dancing properly, as if he hadn’t drunk anything, dancing as if it were the most natural form of locomotion for him, as if his heavy body were rendered weightless, mercilessly dragging Tibor along with him, barely perceptibly lifting him with both arms. The music was so quiet and slow that for some time the two caught up in the dance were the only ones to hear it. It was a mewling, selfpitying kind of tune, with much rubato, the rhythm broken up, and the actor was performing a hitherto unknown kind of dance to it, improvising sweeping gestures, taking Tibor with him. His face was solemn now, almost pious. It seemed to Ábel as he trailed them that the actor was staring deep into Tibor’s eyes. Both of them were highly serious as they danced, disciplined in opposition, staring each other out, not turning away their heads, not even for a second. The two pairs of eyes were watching each other with such anxiety, such close attention it seemed to be vital not to let the other out of sight as their feet and bodies swayed. They kept their necks stiff, head and neck indifferent to the dipping and rising of the torso. How does Tibor know how to dance? thought Ábel. Perhaps he was simply allowing his helpless body to be guided by the actor who had caught him up in his own orbit, Tibor following wherever he was led. Where was this dance leading? They were moving slowly in constant, calm, even patterns as the record wound down. The actor released Tibor and the boy put his hand to his forehead, staggering and grasping at the air before him as if he needed something to hold on to. He stood there, his hand raised, waiting for the actor to return, and it seemed to Ábel that he was not entirely in control of himself. The actor meanwhile was back at the gramophone, putting on another record.

This one was louder. The one-armed one stopped whimpering. The actor seized Tibor and swept him into an ever faster rhythm, occasionally slowing and hesitating, holding back. Ábel felt the pair were stating oppositions in their dance, resisting its true momentum. The actor held Tibor at such a great, precise distance from himself, he was like someone fastidiously carrying a weight over a deep crevice, a feat of considerable strength but one that clearly showed the effort required. In both music and dance there was a latent progress towards some rapidly approaching, desired, irresistible event, a restrained intensification as the actor danced into a circle of light and remained there, not moving out of it, not for a second. Béla stood beside the gramophone, adjusting the needle, winding the mechanism. They did not change the record. The actor stopped between two bars, stopped for a second, let go of Tibor, and in a single movement pulled off his vest and disposed of his wig, throwing it high into the catwalk.

He danced on half-naked. His heavy breasts shook with each maneuver and his bare back shimmered like pale bacon in the spotlight. The actor now tried a new movement, drawing almost imperceptibly closer to Tibor so that without actually touching they were still dancing body-to-body, with an all-but-invisible synchronicity that seemed to join them ever more firmly with each step. It was as if a veil were winding about them, one that tightened with each turn, becoming so tight it was impossible to push against. It was as if it were dictating the pace of the music, so that it was the record that was speeding up with them, growing more tense and excited, clicking over the grooves.

The one-armed one scrambled to his feet again and stole up behind Ábel, craning forward, gazing at the dance. Ábel felt uncomfortable like that and stepped away, but the one-armed one reached for him, squeezed his shoulder, and whispered: “Turn off the music!”

But before Ábel could respond something happened, something that struck them as so sudden and unexpected that for a moment they could do no more than stare without moving, as if they were witnessing some extraordinary natural phenomenon.

The music had finished and the needle continued scraping at the still-turning record but no one paid attention to that. The actor took one more turn with his partner, then he too stopped still, leaning over a little to one side, then freezing like a statue depicting a figure caught in movement. They stood there, both of them, tipping to one side, unmoving in the glare of the lights, a tableau vivant, an allegorical embodiment of “The Dance,” clear and appropriate. The actor had one foot off the ground, his upper body strongly leaning the way the momentum of the dance had taken him. The statue slowly came to life, balancing itself by spreading its feet, moving its arms to raise and support Tibor whose head was cocked back as if he were looking up. The actor’s vast equine head fell forward, his mouth hovered over Tibor’s. Very slowly, as if having to overcome an invisible resistance, as if reluctantly and yet inevitably, the mouth moved with due care and regard to cover Tibor’s. The boy’s head fell back under the weight. Their lips were joined and did not part as the actor with one hand supported the head that had collapsed beneath his, the head powerless, the eyes closed.

Ábel and the one-armed one both leapt on them at once. Béla made a kind of barking noise and attacked the actor’s feet, using both his hands to try and topple the colossus, but the enormous body stood so firm on the great pillars of its legs that for a while they were incapable of shifting it. Ábel got hold of Tibor’s neck and pulled it back with such force that they both fell. They rolled over and over, ending up under the table and remaining there for a second tangled in each other without moving. Tibor was torn from the actor helpless and corpselike, as if released from a powerful magnetic force field, falling weightless, ejected from its ambit. Béla kept tugging at the actor’s legs like an angry dog, whining and grunting. The one-armed one let go of the actor, leapt forward, and smashed his fist into the back of his head. The figure slowly collapsed. It was like downing an enormous effigy.

Ernõ stood at the edge of the stage shielding his eyes with his hands, straining to look into the dark.

There’s someone out there, he cried.

They froze in their places. The one-armed one was the first to crawl slowly across the body of the fallen actor, joining Ernõ. The cobbler’s son leaned far out into the auditorium and pointed his trembling stick to a dark and distant box at top balcony level. There was someone sitting at the back of the box. Béla approached, his teeth chattering. Ernõ’s voice resounded in a high screech through the hall.

There’s someone out there! Look! And he’s been there for some time!

But no one was capable of moving. Out of the silence, in the impenetrable dark, at the back of the box, a chair toppled over and a door slammed shut.