The Rebels

1

THE DOCTOR’S SON LAY ON THE BED, STIFF with cramp. His whole body was covered in sweat, and he felt feverish. He stared at the expanse of window in which the angles of the street, the single tree, a roof, and three further windows were slowly fading. A vertical line of smoke rose from the chimney opposite. By now it was darker in the low-arched room than it was outside. Through the window pressed the stifling early summer heat and in the steamy twilight the gas lamps outside glowed faintly green. Sometimes on spring evenings an invisible fog descends that lends a touch of green to the streetlights. The servant was singing and ironing in the kitchen. In the pane of the partly open window sputtered a ring of sparks from the iron: it was like the striking of a match in the darkness. The girl in the hallway was swinging the fiery metal box above her head.

He lay in a cramp, stared straight ahead, lost in thought. The gang had gone by three o’clock. Without transition it seemed to him that he had woken from some terrible nightmare and that everything would be all right now, he just had to be fully awake, step back into life, and, exercising his best charm and desire to please, make something of it. He gave a painful grin. Slowly he struggled upright, becoming conscious of his limbs, dangling his feet, gazing dreamily at the world around him. His movements were leaden as he raised himself from the bed, made his way to the basin, felt around in the darkness for the jug of water, lowered his head to the tray, and splashed the warm standing water over his damp hair and brow. Dripping with water, practically blind, he found the door and tapped around for the light switch. He sat down at the table and distractedly began to dry his hair with a thick towel.

The alarm clock was ticking on the bedside table. Seven o’clock; he was expected. He had been lying there for four hours, cramped, unmoving. He turned his head like a man with a tight collar, inserting his finger trying to adjust it for comfort. He found it hard to swallow. He went to the basin, washed his hands, rinsed his mouth, swilled the mouthwash round, gargled. Having stopped singing, the girl in the kitchen doorway noticed the light in the student’s room. The boy buttoned his collar and took a few steps round the room. His aunt would not be back before eight.

A long time ago, in his childhood, his aunt had told him that she would leave her treasure to him. That “treasure,” according to her, was stashed away in a secret place where no “agents and brokers” could get at it. Auntie hated the stock market, though she never really explained her loathing. In the child’s imagination the stock exchange remained a dark cave at whose mouth Ali Baba and the forty thieves were grappling with a few powerful, armed men determined to guard their treasure. The bad luck associated with Fridays also played a part in the aunt’s account whenever she spoke of treasure. She spoke of treasure often, with a significant emphasis, telling him that she had checked its secret location that day and that it was all right. Ábel should not worry about the future because the treasure would be his and their lives were almost certain to be free of further trouble. The boy once sought out the secret place, a tin box in the drawer of his aunt’s washstand, where he found some old, no longer valid Lombard Street bills, a few banknotes of the Kossuth era, and some worthless lottery tickets. Auntie’s treasure could no longer help him. He stood at the mirror staring at his creased face, then sat back down at the table. It was a moot point whether money was of any use now, he thought. Perhaps there were matters where money, and all that money could buy—time, travel, distance, health—was of no help at all. He sat before the desk. He pulled open the drawer where notebooks and sheets scribbled over with writing lay in a heap, picked up a poem, and read it. Forgetting all else he read it in an undertone, craning over it. The poem was about a dog lying in the sun. When had he written it? He couldn’t remember.

The girl appeared, stopped in the doorway, and asked whether he would be staying home for supper. She posed there lazily, leaning against the doorpost, one hand on her hip, with a teasing smile on her face. The student ran his eyes over her and shrugged. She had brought the sharp, piquant tang of the kitchen with her, a damp smell hidden in the folds of her skirt that made him wrinkle his nose. He asked whether his aunt had returned yet. No, she wouldn’t be home before eight, she replied.

Nowadays it seemed to him that there were moments when his whole life flashed past him. It was as if the change he had lived through had trapped everything he had experienced on the surface of his memory, so he could see his childhood, his father, and hear the lost voice of his mother, experience it all in individual movements of Aunt Etelka as she bowed before him. He looked around him amazed. The girl followed his eye movements, uncertain what to do.

The room was in a sorry state. The gang had wreaked havoc in it: torn books and magazines lay under the bed, one volume, Fidibus, was soaking in a pool of liqueur from an upturned bottle that gave out a hideous sweet-sickly stench. A muddy footprint was smeared across the plush cover of one of the chairs. Cushions were strewn about the floor. He had finished his exams at eleven in the morning and had waited in the schoolyard for the three members of the gang who had followed shortly after him in alphabetical order, and they had come directly back here to his place, taking no detours. Béla, the grocer’s son, only called his father once they had arrived, telling him that he had passed and that they should not expect him home for dinner. Tibor did not contact his family, keeping from them the news that despite his patently strenuous efforts he had failed; his critically ill mother could wait to find that out in the evening, or the next day come to that. This was such an insignificant matter for the time being, it counted for so little, they didn’t even mention it. In six weeks’ time they would be in uniform and, with one great effort, even if the training dragged on, they’d be out at the front by the end of August.

He sat down on the bed. He looked at the girl. If I were not so timid, not so lacking in courage, thought the student, I’d pull her to me and lay my head on her breast. A decent sleep is the cure for everything. Pity she smells of the kitchen, as I can’t stand kitchen smells, but that’s because I’ve had an upper-middle-class upbringing: my grandfather was a landowner and my father is a practicing doctor. There’s a reason for everything. It may not reflect well on me but sometimes a smell is more powerful than reason. It might be that she cannot stand my smell either, the way the Chinese find the smell of white men disgusting. There are certain barriers between people. The girl had been working there a year and the thought of her full body sometimes haunted his dreams and worked on his fantasy, and often, at moments of adolescent boyish regression, he imagined her as a model. She had a nice face, pale and soft, a blond pigtail amusingly perched on the crown of her head.

The girl started putting the room in order, and in an unintentionally quiet voice he asked her for a glass of milk. He took tiny sips of it, the bland standby drink of childhood, because for days on end they had been drinking wine and spirits, sweet sticky liquor that he quaffed with a stoical obligatory manliness though he didn’t like the taste of it, nor could his stomach digest it. Milk felt good, the drink of that other, lost world. He went to the wardrobe, took out a clean collar, and brushed his coat down while the girl tidied and made the bed. She was sweeping the remnant of a pack of cards from under the table: he suddenly remembered he had no money. Searching his various pockets he found just three crowns, and couldn’t understand it at first for his aunt had handed him twenty crowns in the morning before he set off for his exams. Under normal circumstances this would have constituted a healthy sum and he had to stop for a moment and recall what he had spent it on. After his aunt’s celebratory dinner they had started a game of Ramsli with the German “William Tell” pack and he had lost. His memory of it was somewhat blurry, but he seemed to recall he did not want to play but someone—was it Tibor? was it Ernõ?—made him. He stuffed the remaining money into his pocket and told the girl not to expect him for supper because he might be home late. He stopped in the doorway. One of the pack, an ace of hearts, lay on the threshold so he absentmindedly picked up the greasy and none too clean card, the rest of the pack being strewn on the table where the maid had deposited them. The top card there was another ace of hearts. He reached for it carefully with two fingers and examined it, turned it this way and that way, comparing it with the one he had found on the threshold. In the packs supplied by Piatnik there was usually only one ace of hearts. The two aces looked equally greasy, spotty, and well-used, inviting confidence, both with similar blue backs. He sat down at the table and sorted the pack into its four suits. He discovered two acorn aces as well, and two tens, one of leaves and one of bells. The four cards represented four winners at vingt-etun. After Ramsli they would often go on to play vingt-etun. The doubled cards were exactly like all the others in the pack. The cheat had been careful: they might have been using the pack for months by now. In any case the cards were foolproof. He himself had fished out the pack from a drawer in his father’s writing desk. It was a very old, much-used pack.

HE POCKETED THE CARDS. HE WENT OVER TO his father’s room. People know the precise moment when they leave a place forever, a room, for example, where they have spent a long time. There was no thought in his head but he stood on the threshold and looked back. His mother had had this room at one time. Three generations of his family had occupied the house and this room had always been the women and children’s room. It might have been because of these bright feminine furnishings: the light-colored cherrywood furniture, the low arches under which there swam the constant odors of childhood illnesses, of chamomile tea, violet-root, almond-flavored milk, and baby food. His mother had spent a very short time, perhaps only some three years, in the house, but all those highly potent oriental scents, so powerful that it was enough to leave one bottle unstoppered for a day for the room to be saturated with them for years, like the memory of her own presence, completely filling the house. Certain objects continued living their taboo lives: his mother’s glass, her sewing table, her pincushion survived as if in a bell jar, separated out, though this was something they never spoke about. He couldn’t think of his mother as anything but a very frail, much younger elder sister, and he knew that this early-departed woman lived in his father’s memory the same way. He looked back at the room where he had spent his childhood, where he had been born, where his mother had died. He switched off the light.

In the low light of the streetlamp his father’s current room felt like someone had been buried there, quite recently, someone whose memory the survivors did not dare disturb. There was something trancelike about the condition of the objects, the way the belongings of the dead remain frozen, rather as in a museum. True, his father was still alive, and was at this very moment standing at the operating table of a field hospital, sawing off a leg. Or maybe he was smoking a cigarette in his room, tugging at his beard with one hand, taking off his glasses. For the sake of piety and tidiness Etelka had covered the operating table in the room with a crocheted cloth, and the old surgical chair had taken on the appearance of an unfashionable rocking chair. He didn’t light the lamp. He stood in the doorway, his hands deep in his pockets, his perspiring fingers toying with the cards. A great tide of heat rolled through him. The card parties had started at Christmas when the gang first broke out in a fever of ungovernable anxiety that had dominated their lives ever since. It was possible that someone had cheated in that first moment: he himself had certainly been losing constantly since then. His tutorial fees, the aunt’s little contributions, the sums his father occasionally sent, everything. Was it the winning individual who was the cheat? Perhaps it was precisely the opposite, the loser who had started cheating, now, near the end? He saw their three faces before him and closed his eyes.

In recent days he had been keenly aware of the figure of his father. His father had come to his bedside in dreams and leaned over him with his sad, solemn eyes. Naturally, everyone had a father. Everyone was born somewhere. How much is it possible to know of such things? Perhaps, once all this was over, if he was still alive, when he had developed a portly belly and grown a mustache, he would be walking down a foreign street and would suddenly have to stop because there was his father coming towards him with a face that was swelling to monstrous size as faces in the cinema tended to do, taking on superhuman proportions, and then, coming even closer, his father would part those giant lips of his and say something, pronouncing the single word that explained his whole life. That’s what would happen: he would turn up sometime in a town in the dark that was glimmering ever so slightly, then growing ever brighter, so you could see every leaf on every tree, and the gates to the various houses would open, people step out into the street and start talking. Finally one mouth would bend over another mouth and the eyes close, then faint away.

The room was chilly. The surgical instruments sparkled in the glazed cupboard. In one of those drawers Father kept his slides, sections of diseased brain tissue he had once written a book about and published at his own expense. Several hundred copies of the work lay untouched in the library. In the days just before the war started his father was no longer seeing patients, only the three regulars he had somehow managed to keep on from the old practice: the magistrate, the old woman with the constantly shaking head, and the paranoid Gypsy bandleader who would turn up in the middle of a meal and play the violin for them while they were eating. Father treated these three like members of the family. His invalids respected him. Usually they sat in this very room after supper as if they were part of the family circle gathered to pay each other unctuous compliments. The lady with the shaking head sat with Etelka as they both plied their crochet, the magistrate sat solemnly, ceremoniously, vaguely expectant, under the great chandelier, holding the boy on his knees, and the Gypsy bandleader stood by the piano, leaning a little to one side, his bow in his hand, his violin under his arm, in the careless pose adopted by many famous concert artistes. They could stay like that, silent for hours, as if waiting for something to happen, not saying a word while Father took no notice of them and examined the slides at the desk. At eleven o’clock he would raise his hand to signal that they could go. They would bow deeply and take their leave. It was rare for his father to say anything at these gatherings, and the three invalids’ expressions would be full of respect and an almost agonized seriousness as they turned towards him to acknowledge a chance remark like “It’s been a cold day,” then, having bent their heads, they would withdraw once more into a world of profound meditation. The woman with the shaking head would indicate her agreement by rapidly batting her eyelids, the magistrate and bandleader would frown and concentrate on the deeper implications of the observation. His childhood was full of such incidents.

He recalled two specific occasions in the room. One of them underlay every memory involving his father. He would have been four or five years old, sitting on the floor of this room, playing. His father steps in, sits down beside him on the floor, and without further ado begins to sing:

…Au clair de la Lune

Mon ami Pierrot…

He knows the song. Etelka has taught it to him. His father’s mouth opens and closes, the face is curiously twisted as it laughs, the song emerges from between those enormous teeth with a kind of whimsical childish lisp. He immediately understands that his father wants to put everything right, all that had passed between them from the moment of his birth, the silence, the isolation, the distance, the magic spell under which they had hitherto lived together; this single gesture is to release them from it, that’s what this sitting beside him and singing in such whimsical manner is about. Has he gone mad? he wonders. His father’s voice is losing confidence. He is still singing:

…Non, je ne prête pas ma plume

À un vieux savetier…

but then he stops and they are left staring into each other’s eyes. There is a statue in the main square, an enormous bronze soldier, pointing his rifle at the tyrant’s chest: it’s as if the soldier had leapt off its plinth, fully armed and uniformed, and was running along on all fours. Vieux savetier…, he repeats, his lips trembling, to console his father for whom he now feels a terrible pity. He starts crying. His father slowly gets to his feet, goes to the table, rummages among his books as if searching for something, notices that the child is watching him even through his tears, shrugs his shoulders, and hurries out of the room. For a long time after this they are like two people joined by a lie that degrades them both: their eyes do not meet.

Much later, some ten years later. Father is sitting at his table examining a slide under the table lamp when the boy enters. It’s an early afternoon in winter. The boy stops in the half-light but the father extends his hands towards him and invites him to come closer. There is some dry blue matter between the two sheets of glass, something with blotches and lines on it, like the map of the country he sees in his geography book. The father’s bony finger is following the lines of this peculiar map, moving along its branches, its curves, carefully tracing every kink of one particularly sinuous line, and where the line, somewhere near the edge of the slide, breaks, he taps at the glass.

It is my most beautiful slide, says his father.

The boy knows that his father’s finger is moving over a section of a brain. The image is full of variety, of dangerous, restless twists and turns. “What a map!” he thinks. His father bends close to the sheet of glass, the light intensely illuminating his face whose expression is of agonized, helpless curiosity, transforming his normally self-disciplined gaze into a mask that is almost grotesque. Involuntarily, he too leans closer. His father’s finger is delicately, circuitously following some point in the image where the crooked line gathers into a knot, then moves off in several directions. Like a cartographer who cannot quite orientate himself on a strange map, like a doctor feeling round a body to discover the secret of a diseased organ, he is helpless and impatient.

This was a Ruthenian peasant, his father explains, preoccupied. One day he slaughtered his entire family. His parents, his wife, and his two children. It is my most beautiful slide.

He bends over the dried-up blue substance. His father’s face clears: it is no longer full of painful tense curiosity, it empties, loses expression, the bony hand pushes away the slide and two pairs of eyes look blankly in front of them.

In the evening his father played the violin. He played the violin every night and no one was allowed into the room while he was playing. After supper he would retreat into his room and spend an hour wrestling with the obstinate, rebellious instrument, conjuring a set of tortured sounds from it. His father had never been taught the violin and some kind of shyness and embarrassment prevented him from taking lessons now. His playing was riddled with errors, and entailed, or so the boy felt, a kind of bad faith. He himself knew his efforts were a hopeless, obstinate experiment, and he couldn’t bear it if anyone made a pointed remark about it in his presence. Nevertheless the tortured sounds of his violin filled the house. The awareness of his father’s increasing embitterment as night after night, alone in his room, he struggled with the instrument, made him feel as if his father were engaged in some ugly, shameful habit in the solitude of his room while being overheard by the other gleefully malevolent dwellers in the house. At such times he too would lock himself in his room, sitting in the dark, his hands over his ears, biting his lips, staring and waiting. It was as if his father were doing something low and treacherous. Now the violin lay on top of the cupboard.

When he imagined his father’s death it was like an avalanche. Nothing unusual had happened to him so far, except for the fact that he was more silent than usual when he came back on leave.

Automatically bowing in the direction of the writing desk, he clapped his hat on his head and left the room.

HE MET HIS AUNT IN THE STAIRWELL. SHE WAS dressed in her Sunday best, and groaned as she stopped. They kissed each other. She encouraged him to put a coat on and not be back too late. For a second he entertained the possibility of sinking to his knees and telling her everything.

The stairwell curved in a half circle with wide steps, and with its engravings of the town’s old public buildings gave an impression of grandeur. The stair carpet was of a multicolored folk design. The verandah had once served as his father’s waiting room and was soaked through with the smell of other people, the sickening, pungent iodine-and-ether smell of his father’s medicine cupboard only faintly detectable through it. Ernõ’s father smelled of flour paste and raw leather. Béla’s walked around in a haze of eastern spices, herring, and leftover fresh fruit. Tibor’s house was discreetly scented with lavender, the smell of genteel poverty and sickness, combined with the rather more combative smell of cured leather. Smells characteristic of their fathers’ occupations filled their homes. Ábel always thought of his own house in terms of the sobering light trance of ether, a mixture of acid and narcotic.

And so each nook and cranny of the house lived on in him, sorted according to smell, and providing he followed the magnetic needle of scent he could imagine each room with its own life. His aunt kept her arcanum of a hundred domestic substances—turpentine, benzine, chlorine, petroleum, a large quantity of each since they were rare items in the shops—in the dark corridor between kitchen and dining room. She was just returning from one of her secretive household expeditions. She was carrying her booty of two kilos of starch, rice, and freshly roasted coffee in her crocheted shopping bag. Her black hat, with its short veil in permanent mourning for some unknown deceased acquaintance, was perched on the topknot of her hair. Her sharp yellow nose felt cold against the boy’s face. Etelka entered the house like a guest or a distant relative who was only making a brief visit—and, after his mother’s death, had somehow remained there like a servant, a mother substitute, unpaid, always steadfast and ready to leave at the drop of a hat. Ábel loved her. She was “the other world” as he called her, and he loved her because she spoke softly and attached herself to them, to both of them, to father and son, with all the inexhaustible and ruthless love of the barren and constructed her life around them. She was the sort of old maid who kept people instead of dogs and cats for pets. Ábel knew that Etelka would happily give her life for him. It was a long time since they had been able to bring themselves to talk to each other. With each day that passed that low, oppressive, one-story dwelling was becoming ever more like a hothouse. There was something steamed up, close, and damp about it. Its yellow walls sank under the weight of its double roof. Red guttering framed the yellow façade and the gate, from both sides of which hung cast-iron lamps, lacquered green. Even the garden, that tiny old urban patch of grass, with its minimal cramped proportions, felt like a terrarium. Tall fire walls surrounded it on three sides. In the summer it was densely overgrown with lush weeds. The three of them, Etelka, Father, and Ábel, had lived there, in that house and in that garden, in utter seclusion since the death of his mother, with an occasional, rare change of servants. Later Ábel wondered if Etelka nursed some feelings for his father, if there had been a time when there was more than she let on in her heightened devotion to him. But no one ever spoke of that. He too only recalled it the way one remembers something that has failed to happen, like some mood before a potential shower in childhood, when the room darkens for a moment but no downpour follows the vexed dark that is immediately dispelled by the sun. Only the sensation of waiting remains embedded in the nerves.

You slept for a long time, his aunt was telling him. I wanted to wait until you woke up. I noticed you had been drinking spirits, sweetheart. Beware of hard drink, it can be harmful at your age. I’m just an old woman, Ábel, and can only beg you to look after yourself. You are launched on life now, my child. Do be careful what you do at night. Boys are so impulsive at this age. When is the party to be? It doesn’t matter how late you come home: look in on me. The cost of starch is up again. Eggs too. Should your father come home he should bring some provisions with him. We’ll write him a letter tomorrow and tell him you have passed your exams. Give me a kiss.

She tipped her head towards the boy’s face and squeezed it. They remained like that a moment. People live together but there are long periods when they know nothing of each other’s lives. Then one has the sensation that the other has vanished off the map. This was one corner of the world: his aunt’s furniture inherited from his mother, the garden, his father, the fiddle playing, Jules Verne, and the walk in the cemetery with his aunt on All Souls’ Day. This world had such power that nothing external could destroy it, not even the war. Just once each year some unforeseen thing broke through a chink in it, another world. Everything changed. That which had hitherto been sweet was now bitter, that which had been sour was now like gall. The hothouse became a primeval forest. And his aunt like a corpse, or less than that.

He slammed the glazed door, the bell swung and rang, the sound swam through the air and penetrated the silent house. He looked back from the gate: his aunt stood at the glazed door, her hands linked, and stared at him.

THE WINDOWS OF THE THEATER WERE LIT. A CAR was waiting by the side door that led to the upstairs boxes. He cut across the high street and decided to call on Ernõ’s father.

The cobbler had returned home some eighteen months ago with a serious wound in his lungs and had been spitting blood ever since. He lived in a high apartment block down a narrow alleyway among fishmongers, in a cellar that was five shallow steps down from the street and served as both his workplace and his accommodation. The entrance was surrounded by painted signs that he himself had made, signs involving mysterious pictures studded with captions in a hodgepodge of biblical language, exhorting any passerby to live modestly and to come to Christ. “Young man, hold high your Shield of Faith,” proclaimed one sign. “God takes no pleasure in your great knowledge, your rank, your strength, or your declarations of religion, but if you give your heart to Jesus He will put a veil between you and your past and prepare you for the glory of the Lord,” said another. “Raise our hearts, almighty Savior, like the serpent of brass, so that those who are disappointed in life might be cured by embracing You,” said a third. And one in particularly large letters declared: “Neither will death always begin with dying. There are many among us living yet coffined. Dedicate yourself to death; lay your life in the hands of Jesus and you will no longer fear death.”

People stopped, read the texts, shook their heads, and walked on in astonishment.

The workshop was densely shrouded in the half-light and a simmering bowl full of paste filled the room with its ripe, sour, acid smell. The cobbler was sitting hunched by an oxyacetylene lamp next to a low table, like a huge shaggy insect hypnotized by the circle of light. Once he noticed the boy he carefully arranged everything he had been working with on the table, including the large uncured leather sole that had been lying on his lap, the shoe knife, the thread, and a scrawny yellow half shoe, and only then stood up and bowed deeply.

“Blessed be the name of the Lord. He who confirms us in our faith and leads us to victory over our foes.”

What Ábel liked about him was that he issued his grandly ceremonial greetings in such an indifferent, commonplace manner he might have simply been mouthing “your servant.” The cobbler was a short, shriveled man entirely consumed by his disease. The weight of his leather apron seemed to drag him down. One leg was shorter than another, a condition he contracted before the bullet found his lung. A long mustache dripped from his wasted, bony face, adhering to his tousled beard and uncut hair that would not lie flat, but covered his skull like a wire wig, a shrub full of thistles. His great black eyes shone and turned with a confused light deep beneath his brow, the whites as large as a Negro’s.

“The young gentleman is looking for my son, Ernõ,” said the cobbler, his peculiarly small white sickly hand gesturing him to take a seat. There was considerable natural grace in his movements. He himself did not sit down, but leaned on a short crooked stick to address his guest. “My son Ernõ is not at home. We must be reasonable about such things. We cannot ask him to spend all his time with his parents. The young gentlemen have taken their exams today and have therefore moved up a step in the eyes of God and man.”

He spoke in a flat voice, with as little emotion or expression as ever, as if he were praying or reciting the liturgy.

“My unworthy son, Ernõ, has today been allotted his place among the gentlemen sons of gentlemen fathers,” he continued. “Judging by the available evidence it seems it was not the Lord’s will that my son Ernõ should be a prop to his parents in their old age. He wants my son to live among gentlemen, and to become my enemy. It would be foolish and absurd of me to rail against God’s will. Today my son has entered the superior rank of gentlefolk, and he must needs be the enemy of his lowly parents, his relations, and everyone who knew him.”

He made a gesture in the air with his hand as if bestowing a blessing. “He who recognizes the hand of God in mortal affairs rejoices in sickness, misfortune, and enmity between his kinfolk. My son Ernõ is a quiet boy who rejects the forthrightness the great source of Light has bestowed on me, his father, so that I may fulfill my obligations. The way has opened unto him: mountains have collapsed. It is utterly certain that the hour has come when the ruling social order must demand bloody sacrifices. Millions are lying dead in the ditches of the world and, insignificant as I am, I have been allowed to survive while the ruling classes offer involuntary sacrifices unto the earth and its waters.”

Yes, Mr. Zakarka, said Ábel. May I speak to Ernõ?

“Indeed,” he continued undisturbed. “Be so gracious as to consider the scale of the matter. We have been used to seeing how the ruling class, with its remarkable refinement, its extraordinary achievements in each and every field, remained immune to all natural disasters such as earthquakes, flood, fire, and war, providing God’s finger had not picked them out specifically. We have been used to there being two classes in the world, one living in close proximity to the other, but having less to do with it than do locusts with bears. Please be so gracious as to remember that the last days are here. The sons of the ruling class are lying in the same lime pits as the sons of the low. The prophets have risen and their words are becoming audible; the Lord has marked even my humble words out for hearing and for following.”

The cobbler threw a long shadow in the hissing light of the oxyacetylene lamp. He gave an occasional cough adding “Beg your pardon” each time as he trundled off into a corner of the workshop where he spent some time hawking and spitting.

Ábel sat there, leaning forward. He knew he had to wait until the cobbler had had his say. The Bible lay on a shelf on the wall among a few old mugs and pots, with a child-sized meter-high crucifix on the wall beside it. The cobbler swayed as he walked, very much dependent on his stick. After he had finished coughing he continued in a cracked voice.

“As concerns my son, Ernõ,” he began, tucking his hands under his leather apron, “the young gentlemen were kind enough to accept him into their company, for which he will owe them an eternal debt of gratitude, a debt that will linger long after the young gentlemen have gone. By any human estimation my son Ernõ, with his stunted body and inherited diseases, is likely to outlive the young gentlemen who treated him with such kindness, and who have proved more amenable than my unfortunate son to following the examples of their heroic gentlemen fathers. It goes to show that there’s a point even to illness and deformation. The young gentlemen are going where all are equal in the eyes of death, but Ernõ is staying here. He will become a gentleman since the hour of trial will pass from the face of the earth, and those who remain will be the recipients of God’s special favor. It is my intention to remain alive long enough to see that hour.”

Having announced this he gave an easy courteous bow, an almost apologetic bow as if there was nothing he could do about any of this. Ábel looked at the crucifix. The cobbler followed his gaze with a stern expression.

“The young gentlemen were kind to my son. Especially the son of the much respected Mr. Prockauer. I must not forget this. Young Master Prockauer, though not personally respectable, enjoys such an elevated position in the world owing to the very high respect in which his honorable father is held, that his friendship is an honor of which my son will be forever sensible. Ernõ is aware how much he owes to the gentleman. It may be because of his natural taciturnity that he has not spoken of his gratefulness to me, though, naturally, my poor understanding cannot gauge the deeper meaning of what gentlemen say. But what the waking will not say, the sleeping will occasionally utter. My son has often addressed young Master Prockauer by his first name when asleep.”

“Tibor?” asked Ábel. His throat was dry.

The cobbler stepped into a chamber of the cellar that was hidden by a curtain. “I slept here at his feet,” he said and waved in the direction of a box bed with drawers under it. “I took to the floor, which is harder, and gave up the bed to my son so he should get used to the gentlemen’s style of doing things. That’s where I heard, more than once, my son shout out the first name of young Master Prockauer. A person only calls to someone else in his sleep when he is suffering. I have no way of telling what caused my son to suffer in his sleep so that he should cry out the young gentleman’s name.”

He allowed the curtain to fall as if covering up some shameful sight. So this is where Ernõ lives, thought Ábel. He had never dared imagine where Ernõ slept, what he ate, or what they talked about at home. He had visited the workshop often enough recently, but always when Ernõ was away, and the cobbler had never shown him the room where he and his son lived. But this was where Ernõ slept with his father. His mother probably had her own bed in the place.

“Perhaps it was out of gratefulness that my son shouted out Master Prockauer’s first name,” said the cobbler. “The young gentleman had long honored my son with his company. Even in the lower years at school he allowed my son to take home books belonging to his father, the colonel. And later, when the young gentleman was, with perfectly excusable carelessness, neglecting his studies, the colonel’s boy bestowed on my son the distinction of allowing him to be of help to him. The good graces of gentlemen are indeed inscrutable. It was thanks to the offices of the good colonel that I was permitted to take part in that great cleansing at the front.”

“In what?” Ábel leaned forward. The cobbler straightened. “The cleansing. It is not the proper time to speak of everything just yet. The only man capable of being cleansed is he who has undergone humiliations. The good colonel, whose son showered such favors on my son, made it possible for me to be cleansed, when he chose me in the absence of his official aide. I had three opportunities to be cleansed.”

He extended his hands before him.

“For one who gives life, all methods are equally suitable when employing an aide for the taking of life. Be so kind as to consider all we have to thank the noble gentlemen of the Prockauer family for. My son not only had the privilege of educating a high-ranking officer’s son, and, in due course, to appear in the company of gentlemen of which he would become one even while wearing his castoffs, but I, his father, am in the colonel’s debt for having been allowed to participate in the great cleansing appointed by the Lord, in a triple cleansing. With these two hands. Is the young gentleman unaware of this?”

“You, Mr. Zakarka?” asked Ábel and stood up. He wasn’t shocked but he was filled with wonder.

“I had three opportunities. Didn’t my son Ernõ mention these to the young gentlemen? Perhaps he didn’t want to brag about his father’s cleansing, and if so, he did right, because it is proper that the lowly should retain his modesty, even when, out of their goodness, gentlemen permit him to join them. I had three opportunities of being cleansed. Be so gracious as to be informed that the war which the Lord in his goodness allowed to happen so that we might see our sins, offers us mortals few opportunities for cleansing. Aiming a gun and, at a certain distance, bringing down a man is not the same as snuffing out a life with our bare hands, and I do mean precisely that. It is different closing one’s hands about a person’s neck and breaking his vertebra, different from, say, using a sharp implement and wounding a fellow human being, and different again from bombarding someone at a distance with the assistance of certain explosive materials. Cleansing can only occur when a man is directly in touch with death. And, what was more, all three were gentlemen.”

“Who were they?” the boy asked.

They were standing eye to eye. The cobbler leaned closer.

“Czech officers. Traitors from the motherland’s point of view. It was a peculiar act of grace on the colonel’s part, an act for which I will remain eternally grateful to him that he entrusted me with officers, not common people. As I have said, my family stands in especial debt to the Prockauers. I hear the condition of the noble lady has deteriorated.”

“When did you hear?” asked Ábel overeagerly.

He immediately regretted asking the question. The cobbler’s eyes roved round the room then suddenly found and buried themselves in his own, the feeling hot and sharp. It was like looking into dazzling light. He closed his eyes. The condition of Tibor’s mother had been giving cause for concern for several days. It was a strange feeling, this anxiety. They didn’t talk about it. The colonel’s wife had been bed-bound for three years: her condition changed but she didn’t rise from her bed. Her elder son, who had returned a few months previously as an ensign, having lost an arm at the front, stubbornly kept repeating that she was perfectly capable of getting up and simply didn’t want to. He told people that once the boys were in bed at night she would rise from her sickbed and walk about in the apartment. If there was indeed a change in the condition of Tibor’s mother then something had to be done quickly for the colonel might appear any day. He didn’t dare look at the cobbler who stood directly in front of him and who seemed to have grown somewhat in the twilight. Ábel knew he was the same height as the cobbler but felt as though he were being forced to look up at him. The light in the cobbler’s eyes slowly went out. They both looked down.

“It’s nothing to do with me,” said the cobbler. “I humbly beseech the young gentleman not to mention the matter in front of Master Tibor. The elder son of Colonel Prockauer was here earlier, also seeking my son Ernõ. He mentioned it in passing.”

“What?”

The oxyacetylene lamp flared up. The cobbler limped over to the lamp and carefully turned the flame down.

“As people do in conversations. Young Master Lajos, if I may so refer to him, being a fellow soldier on the front and a comrade in arms, has made a significant sacrifice for the homeland. Soldiers who have served at the front look each other up when opportunity affords. We talk of a good many things at such times. Young Master Lajos also made mention of the fact that young Master Tibor was worried. I must not neglect to mention that apart from losing an arm in that great bloodbath, young Master Lajos made a spiritual sacrifice too. He doesn’t remember very much of what he has said. And when he says something, pretty soon after he doesn’t want to know anything about it. In the course of conversation he mentioned that it was not absolutely impossible that there had been some deterioration in the noble lady’s condition. We must prepare ourselves, he said. That’s how I know.”

Ábel knew nothing of this for certain. It could be that the one-armed invalid had imagined it all. The elder of the Prockauer boys was given to strange behavior at times. Once he had avoided and laughed at his younger brother’s circle of friends and their amusements: now he was forever seeking them out. Little by little they included him in everything. He was the first to make the acquaintance of the actor. Ábel thought about it: they had known the actor by sight for a long time, but the one-armed Lajos was the first to introduce himself and get him to meet the others. No doubt he had been his loquacious self.

He talked with the cobbler about Tibor’s anxieties, anxieties that resulted in him betraying their common secret. It would be good to know how far Lajos had taken the cobbler into his confidence. The cobbler was inclined to talk, admittedly in his own peculiar way, though much depended on whom he was addressing. Ernõ told them his father was not a frequenter of bars and that he kept his set speeches about the new order between rich and poor, and on the collapse and rebuilding of the world, for a selected audience.

He had never doubted that the cobbler was not quite right in the head, but the manner in which he performed his speeches was so calm and disciplined that, eye to eye, he did not feel he was talking to a madman any more than when listening to certain views of adults generally. In its proper context, in its own way, everything he said was sober and to the point. When he thought about it he couldn’t quite free himself of the uncomfortable feeling that there was something attractive in the cobbler’s obsession, something he couldn’t just skip over, get on with his life, and ignore. The cobbler fascinated him, but not like Ernõ did, or like Tibor, not even like the actor—nothing like them, quite the contrary in fact, but that contrary was irresistible to him. From time to time he felt obliged to seek the cobbler out.

The cobbler was Ernõ’s father, and Ernõ was one of the gang. Indeed, Ernõ was one of the pillars of the gang. Each time they launched out on something afterwards it seemed to him that the silent and secretive Ernõ had somehow initiated it. He hadn’t known, of course, that the cobbler had actually hanged men at the front. Ábel was taken aback but felt no horror. He looked at the cobbler, at those hands that had furthered the process of “cleansing,” and neither hated nor shrank from them. It was beyond his comprehension: his mind could not grasp it. The whole thing had happened too quickly: childhood, the hothouse, Father’s sessions with the violin, then that something else that other people called the war, but which changed nothing in his life, and suddenly there he was, standing among adults, burdened with guilt and lies, hatching life or death schemes with the gang whose members a year, a day, or one hour earlier were as much children as he had been, living in a different, gentler, tamer world, knowing nothing of danger. They didn’t have time to bother with what the adults were doing. Their fathers went away, their elder brothers were called up, but these obscure and, as far as they were concerned, far from terrible but boring and everyday occurrences, indeed anything anyone did in those faraway places, were of no interest to them. He couldn’t begin to cope with excess knowledge, such as the knowledge that Ernõ’s father had hanged people. That was something to do with fathers and elder brothers. One heard of other things like that. The world he had known had smashed and he felt he was walking on its shards. It might be that in a few weeks or a few months he too would have to hang people. If Mr. Zakarka regarded this as a form of cleansing, that was his business. People cleanse themselves as best they can.

The cobbler often employed the term “cleansing.” Ábel found it attractive but couldn’t understand what exactly he meant by it. The cobbler quoted the Bible. Ábel liked his turn of phrase. His manner of speech affected him like a kind of seductive singing, a singing that was off-key and full of missed notes, yet the voice was alive and full. It had something of the wayside preacher in it. At one point he had referred to himself as “a minor prophet” and lowered his eyes.

Sometimes he had the feeling that the cobbler knew everything about them. He knew some surprising things about the town. He rarely left his miserable room, yet it was as though he had invisible emissaries: with a word here and a word there he let slip that he knew what was going on and kept his eyes on everything. He hardly ever spoke when his son was present. When Ernõ entered their poor quarters the cobbler would give a deep bow and fall silent. He would speak respectfully of his son even in his presence but he would never address him directly. Ábel watched him with amazement. Each time he came he had to restrain himself from pouring his heart out to him. Sometimes, just now in fact, as he was walking down the street, he felt an irresistible temptation to call on the cobbler and tell him everything. Perhaps I should ask him to turn the light off, he thought. It would be easier in the dark. It was only a few months since he had made the acquaintance of Ernõ’s father, up till then he had known nothing of him. Thinking it over, he didn’t think he was mad. The cobbler seemed to be of no particular age. He felt closer to him than he did any ordinary adult. It was as if the cobbler, like the gang, was living in that transitional state between childhood and adulthood. The cobbler was neither adult nor child. Like them he seemed to hover in a world between good and evil. He felt the weight of this knowledge as intensely as he would the burden of a terrible secret. He was frightened of the cobbler, though sometimes it felt as though he were the only man who could help him. He was like an adult to look at, but Ábel’s sense of him was of someone in disguise, a child wearing a false beard.

He could never decide whether the cobbler was friend or foe. He employed broad terms: The gentry, he said. The poor. Only sinners may be cleansed. At such times his voice rang like a true preacher’s. His frail, flat tones filled the narrow room.

“As I said,” he ended without any change of pace, “my son Ernõ is in the coffeehouse with the young gentlemen. Custom now openly permits him to frequent places reserved for adult gentlemen.”

He bowed and sat back down on his chair and picked up his work as though there was no one else present. Ábel stood beside him and watched him as he leaned, bent-backed, over the sole and pricked a series of tiny holes at the perimeter of the leather strip with his auger. Ábel had come to tell him everything, to talk about Tibor and the actor, to ask him for help in the face of the danger that was threatening them all. Now that he was staring at the cobbler’s wire-wig hair his nerve failed him again. Whatever is said out loud has life. He quietly and timidly took his leave, though the cobbler was no longer paying attention to him. When he reached the steps the cobbler spoke. Astonished, Ábel turned round and saw the cobbler was laughing.

“We will all be cleansed,” said the cobbler and raised his leather-knife. His face was radiant.

IT WAS INDEED POSSIBLE THAT THEY WOULD ALL be cleansed. He walked slowly beside the wall, aimlessly, as if he had no particular place to go. The gang would surely be waiting for him by now. The pack of cards was weighing down his pocket. It was a warm evening, uneasily warm. Some time that afternoon there must have been rain that covered the street with a thin, soft sheen of light, but as evening approached a wind got up in the hills and within a few minutes had dried the surfaces. A balmy haze of warmth drifted through the air conveyed to town by freshly swollen fields when the mist of the spring evening rises and dew begins to settle in the pores of the skin.

He had turned eighteen in April but looked younger than that. Down the school corridors, just before you reached the conference rooms, there was a group of old class photographs on display. He had often studied them, surprised at how different he and his generation looked from those who had graduated ten or twenty years ago. They were enormous mature men, almost without exception. Though most of their faces looked young, there were those among them who seemed fully adult. There were one or two with fine curling mustaches. Next to them Ábel’s friends looked like children in short pants. It was as if with every year that passed the generations had grown softer and more childish. He found the picture of his father’s graduation year. There was Kikinday the judge, Kronauer the colonel in the medical corps, and there was his father too: all proper adults. Kronauer had a sharp mustache, checkered trousers, and a coat after the French fashion. He held a tall hat in his hands. His father was manly, broad-shouldered. He was practically all man, differing from the figure Ábel knew only in that he lacked the latter’s addition of a beard. But you could imagine him bearded even then, twenty-four years ago. He wondered how he himself would look if he grew a beard or a mustache. Thinking that, he gave a bitter grin. It was unlikely he would get that far because his face was still completely smooth and white, lacking any sign of whiskers, lacking even the ghost of a mustache. His hands were small too, like a child’s. Perhaps humanity degenerated year by year. But it was also possible that they were evolving. The Japanese were small too, refined, and yet looked older.

He had begun to read two years ago. He read unsystematically, whatever came to hand. One day he wrote something. He was fifteen. When he saw the piece of paper with his writing on it he got a fright and hid it in his drawer. The next day he took it out and read it. It wasn’t poetry but it didn’t seem to be quite prose either. It scared him so he tore it up. His fear persisted for days. At that time he was still inhabiting “this” side of life. There was no one he dared talk to. What was this? Why did he write it down? What does it mean when a man picks up a pen and writes something? When something simply comes to him and it appears there, complete, in his writing? Why should he have done that? Is this what writers do? He had come across a book once that someone had brought home from the front. It was a Russian book, full of Russian script. A novel. The author was anonymous. He could not help but feel shaken when he thought of it. Somewhere in Russia there lived this anonymous figure conjuring characters, events, and entire tragedies out of nothing, committing them to paper, a spirit floating over an immense distance, and here he was holding it in his hands.

He stopped in front of the bookshop window and ran a melancholy eye over the books. Books hid some secret, not precisely in what they said, but in the reason for them being written at all. There wasn’t anybody he could discuss this with. He did try occasionally with Ernõ, but Ernõ always seemed to be speaking of something else and they failed to communicate with each other. Ernõ talked about the books’ “contents.” He knew that was of secondary importance. What he wanted to know was why the books existed. Do they bring joy to those who write them? He felt they must cause more pain than pleasure. And if you write something down, is it then lost, does it have nothing to do with you any more, is there only a memory, an ache, left behind, as if you had been found guilty of something, something for which, sooner or later, you would have to answer?

He wrote a few poems. He described somebody’s appearance or a conversation he had overheard in the street. No one knew he had done this, not the gang and certainly not his aunt. Tibor was only interested in sports, the theater, and girls. For Béla it was fashion and girls. The one-armed one was utterly fixated on girls. It was difficult to know what interested Ernõ. He was a passionate chess player. An excellent mathematician. But the mystery of why someone sat down each night to commit whatever he had seen or heard to paper was of absolutely no interest to him.

He sat alone in his room at night, a sheet of paper before him, but it was his father’s secret sessions with the violin that came to mind, which made him blush, so he quickly rose from the table, lay down, and immediately turned off the light. He knew what he was doing was not the real thing. It was no more than what his father was doing when he played the violin. And it wasn’t simply a matter of someone writing down what he had seen and heard during the day. There was always something beyond such events, some secret, some meaning, some connection between them that he should discover, seize on, and articulate. One day he found a copy of War and Peace. When he got as far as the scene where the prince returns from the battlefield and sees his dead wife whose expression seems to be asking “What have you done to me?” he shuddered. He felt someone had expressed a thought that could probably not be articulated in words. It was something that affected the whole realm of human experience. “What have you done to me?”

He reached the high street. The city shimmered with weak light like an invalid’s bedroom. Couples were still strolling in crowds down the avenue: in the theater the performance had just begun. Some officers were standing around in front of Béla’s father’s delicatessen, chatting with the hunchbacked chemist who had an intimate knowledge of the town and its affairs. They were sizing up the girls and the chemist was helping them by revealing their interesting little secrets. Now and then they burst out in a storm of laughter. They were on leave, wounded, each one wearing one of the uniforms of the front. The chemist covered his mouth with his hand.

Opposite the theater, in front of the café, stood the actor leaning on an advertising pillar. The one-armed one was with him, loudly explaining something. When Ábel reached them the actor greeted him with a profound bow.

“We were waiting for you, my angel,” he said.

THE ACTOR HAD ARRIVED IN TOWN WITH THE company in the early autumn, saying he had had a contract in the capital first, but the theater had closed. He was forty-five years old but claimed to be thirty-five. Not even the gang believed this though they eagerly swallowed everything else he told them. He tended to play comic, dancing roles but referred to himself as a ballet instructor. The contract laid down that the company was obliged to supply divas and leading men each season for a few highlights from popular operettas. It was the comedian-dancer’s task to teach them the appropriate elements of ballet.

He had put on weight, developing a proper paunch and jowls, a rare thing in the world of comedians and dancers. The audience liked him because he included a lot of current gossip in his act. He wore a wig of light chestnut color. His head was large and equine. His jaw was thrust forward and he was so near-sighted that he couldn’t see the prompter’s box, but he refused to wear glasses out of vanity, not even in real life, as he put it.

His stage name was Amadé: Amadé Volpay was how they billed him. He spoke with his mouth full as if chewing on a dumpling. He wore generously fitting, light suits that skillfully disguised his fatness as did his corset that was laced so tightly when he was on stage that his face was practically red, so that he didn’t look half as fat as he did in life. It was as if his girth were no more than some kind of misapprehension that existed between him and the world at large, and he never ceased talking about it. He spoke eloquently and at length to both intimates and strangers in the effort to persuade them that he was not fat. He produced precise measurements and medical tables showing average proportions to prove he was as slender as a flamingo and that his figure was in all respects the manly ideal, his belly swelling as he did so because, in his passion, he forgot to hold it in.

Bearing this in mind he would walk down the street like a ballet dancer, practically mincing. He propelled his substantial body along on points, with delicate, genuinely airy steps, as if it weighed nothing, as if he feared being blown away by the next gust of wind. He always shaved his jowls to the same dazzling pale blue sheen. He would then apply powders and creams to them, and arrange them carefully in the space allowed by his folded-over collar as if they were a discrete and separate part of his body. Occasionally he would touch them tenderly with his short, pudgy, remarkably pale fingers to check that nothing was awry, that everything was where it ought to be.

The actor spent all day on the street, on the most frequented stretch of the high street, between the church and the café, from which he could keep an eye on the side entrance to the theater. You could see him there at all hours, patrolling up and down, usually holding forth and surrounded by a gaggle of people. It was only after supper that he retreated to the middle picture window of the café where anyone passing was obliged to acknowledge his presence and from which position he, in his turn, could keep track of everyone. He didn’t play cards. He didn’t drink. He appeared to avoid his fellow actors. His clothes carried the sweet but choking smell of cinnamon. It was this smell that emanated from him to the outside so that anyone passing him would know that Amadé Volpay was around.

He wore two rings on his fleshy fingers, one signet ring with a red stone and a wedding ring. He never denied that he was Jewish and unmarried. The rings were only for show.

THE GANG HAD ALREADY FORMED BY THE TIME the actor first appeared in town. There is in the development of every human association a period of jelling, a process of crystallization of whose laws we remain ignorant. They had in fact been in the same class since fourth grade. Ernõ was the only one who had spent eight full years at the institute. Béla, the grocer’s son, had shuttled between three schools before arriving there; he was a whole year at a school in the capital. He had been educated at boarding establishments, in places where there were thirty boys to a dormitory. Even in childhood he had worn a sword with his house uniform, a ceremonial smallsword to be precise. Tibor arrived in the fourth grade when the colonel was posted to the town. Ábel entered the school in the third grade having been taught at home before that.

There had been fifty of them in the fourth grade. Only seventeen remained to graduate. The war, of which they never spoke, silently took its toll of their numbers, secretly, half-unnoticed, as it tends to do in such remote nooks of life, even in a grade at the middle school of a provincial town. When war broke out they were entering fifth grade and there were still fifty of them. Now, four years later, only seventeen remained to graduate. Many of them simply failed to reappear. The peasant boys went home to take their fathers’ places. Many couldn’t afford the school fees. Many more just failed to attend without telling anyone why. Perhaps they were sick. Perhaps they had died. Many did indeed die, and their bodies were borne out with flags of mourning and wailing choirs. About a million had died on the front in those years, it was said. Or was it two million? There were even some who claimed three million. But they lived their obscure and remote lives behind the lines, among the mountains, the town wrapped in silence as in cotton wool. The war filtered through to them down channels no wider than a hair’s breadth. These hairbreadths sucked the life from the town as if driven by an invisible vast pump that replaced it with the stench of war, a peculiar, pestilent gas that arrived directly from the front, diluted a little, thinned out, but percolated through with enough strength to stiffen limbs, to fry lungs, and to destroy the weak. You couldn’t positively say this or that student was a victim of the war. But when the war broke out there were fifty of them and by the time they posed for the class photograph there were seventeen.

For two years, until seventh grade, the members of the gang took no notice of each other. They lived separate lives in close proximity to each other. Tibor gave himself over to his passion for sport. Ábel devoted himself to literature. Ernõ was wholly absorbed by his studies. It is very hard to say what brought them together, especially at this rather early age when there are no mutual concerns that help to develop friendship. You couldn’t say that the members of the gang ever liked each other. Not even that they felt any common sympathy. Béla sat at the back of the class and was, for some years, one of the low achievers, and had hardly exchanged a word with Ábel or with Tibor. Ábel did occasionally spend time with Ernõ but was always dismissed on a minor trifle, some hardly registered, unspoken rebuff that for a long time separated him from the cobbler’s boy. Generally it is not mutual feeling that unites people. On the contrary, people usually find the process of being thrown together painful and embarrassing. It is not a particularly amusing experience for two people to find themselves in company.

For three years Ábel sat in the middle of the third row from the door. Ernõ was stationed behind him, Tibor to his right in the front row. That’s how they spent three years. One day at the beginning of the fourth year Ábel was staring blankly ahead, bored with physics, slowly surveying the rows of other desks when his gaze settled on Tibor who had his head in his hands oblivious to everything, absorbed, reading a book under the table. It wasn’t that Ábel was particularly taken by the sight, nor was he the subject of some miraculous instantaneous illumination. Indeed, his first response was indifference and he decided to shift his attention elsewhere. But what he found, astonishingly, was that he couldn’t look away for long. His eyes wandered over the room, aware of the sleepy hum of fat autumnal bluebottles trailing their gross little bodies over the window. He couldn’t look away. Once he had convinced himself that it was Tibor’s head that was demanding his attention, he turned round to regard him with renewed interest. Was there something about Tibor he had failed to notice before? Maybe he had combed his hair a little differently today or was wearing a strange new tie. Ábel examined him carefully. He couldn’t see anything particularly different. Tibor’s hair was cropped short in military fashion. He was wearing a khaki-colored outfit and a green bow-tie. His fingers were automatically soothing his brow. He kept reading. At one point he put a finger to his nose, picked something, and rubbed it between his fingers absently while turning the pages with his other hand under the desk. For all Ábel could see he was fully absorbed in his book. He was probably reading the sports annual. Something about horses or football. Ábel watched him, trying to understand what it was that was so fascinating about him. He considered Tibor’s ears. They were small and pointed, close to his head. The fingers with which he was stroking his brow were bent like hooks yet the hand itself was soft and round. Ábel looked at his nose, Tibor’s face in quarter profile. The face had clear angular lines. He was the softer mirror image of Colonel Prockauer, only some thirty years younger and a touch freckled. Ábel gazed at him thoughtfully, and frowned. Later it would seem as if everything he had previously known about Tibor was brought into focus in these few seconds. For instance he knew that he had freckles on his neck as well as his face: they were there where his blond hair made a narrow arch above the topmost vertebra. The marks looked as if flies had dirtied that very pale skin of his.

Now Tibor moved, pushed the book under the desk, and looked around inquiringly, returning to the world. For a moment Ábel could see those fleshy, sulky lips head-on. They indicated a state of bored annoyance. He felt shaken for a second. Out of the blue, without even thinking about it, the words How beautiful he is! came to him. These four words decided the matter. Then Tibor bent down again and Ábel could only see the crown of his head, the boy between them hiding him from view. This caused him such pain it was as if someone had forcefully robbed him of a unique, once-in-a-lifetime experience. It was a bodily pain occasioning a terrible sense of loss, the kind a dog feels when you snatch his half-eaten dish from him, or what anyone might feel when a breathtaking landscape is suddenly obscured by a tunnel. He felt such pain and fury it made him want to groan out loud. There were practically tears in his eyes as he shifted slightly to one side and rose a little from his seat in order to see Tibor, now, immediately, now while the beauty lasted, for one second too late and it would be gone. And it was true: for when they met at break and he could look calmly, with even a certain curiosity, into Tibor’s eyes, he was disappointed to discover that he felt nothing at all.

But when he was alone in his room that afternoon, while he was drawing something, just as he had pushed away the drawing board and was starting to fiddle with the brush, somewhere between the two movements the feeling returned, much more powerful now than it had been in the morning. It was so strong that his whole body ached as he shifted: it reared up at him as he bent over the desk. He is beautiful, he cried out, half audibly. It was a wholly intangible feeling. It was a kind of happiness he had never even dreamt of. There was a sweetness to it, a taste that brought tears to his eyes. It made him shake. He is beautiful: Tibor is beautiful, he repeated with bloodless lips, feeling a touch chilly. His hand was cold too, bloodless and trembling. He stood up and ran about the room a little, avoiding the furniture. There were tears in his eyes: he felt dizzy and would have liked to hold on to something. A desire for oblivion flooded through him. This was the ultimate thing, this beauty. There was nothing else. The world could offer no more. The tame world he had so far inhabited was split wide open, its contents ran out: he stood naked and shivering.

A week later the gang was formed. It takes hardly a moment to form a crystal from the appropriate miscellaneous elements: you cannot know what process preceded the formation, just as we cannot know what drives certain people together, people who hitherto knew nothing of each other, but who immediately form a solid body under conditions that create more anxiety than guilt ever does: so it is with parents and children, so with lovers, and so with murderers. They launched forth from the four corners of that room, each greedy for the others, as if they had been waiting years for precisely this, as if they had a thousand things to communicate and share. Within a week the four of them were as one though they had hardly said a word to each other before. Béla, on whom they had slightly looked down, was practically breathless in the effort to join them before it was too late. Once all four were together in a nook of the corridor they looked into each other’s eyes and started to speak. Ernõ took off his pince-nez and they suddenly fell silent. Tibor stood in the center. He started to say something but the words stuck in his mouth. The other three were looking at him. They waited, silent a while, then all four slowly shuffled back to their places.

THEY WERE STANDING BY THE REVOLVING DOORS of the café. The actor took his hand for a second. The Roman emperors had been absolute rulers. There was something of Nero in Amadé. Nero himself had been an actor. Fine. In any case you are the first adult whom I can address familiarly as tu, with whom I am on tutoyer terms, as an adult with adults. He says he has visited Barcelona. He might be lying. One should check up and make sure. Father is sitting down to supper. He might have amputated four legs by now, legs as substantial as this actor’s. Here’s Lajos. He has half an arm missing. Amadé is wearing a pale brown necktie today: this is the fourth necktie he has been seen wearing. Here comes Mr. Kikinday whom someone seems to have sentenced to death. His necktie is dark blue with white spots. Yellow silk with green stripes. White silk with big blue spots. Etelka has a blouse that is white silk with big blue spots. She no longer wears it: it is a year since she last had it on. Amadé always has that cinnamon smell. We were playing in the garden with the janitor’s daughter, then we went to the shed and played a game in which I punished her so she had to lie down and I pulled up her skirt and beat her bare bottom till it was red. Then Etelka turned up, saw us, and gave us a beating. I was four. The girl three. Etelka was forty. Once she left the door open to the cupboard full of underwear and I pulled out a shred of cloth and played with it, tying it round my head the way the maid does her headscarf. Etelka grew quite red when she saw me, snatched the cloth from me, and smacked my hand. Today I know the thing I was playing with was her brassiere, that the piece of cloth she dashed off with was a brassiere fresh from the laundry. I was four. How do I know now that the shred of cloth was my aunt’s brassiere? No one told me. And what was there so outrageous about the fact that my aunt had breasts that required support? How warm that hand is. His hand is so soft that my index finger sinks into the pad of flesh in his palm. Amadé’s wig is nicely fixed. When I found my aunt’s hair in the cupboard behind the books I thought I had finally unmasked her. My aunt had no wig but she did wear hairpieces. I discovered two fat shiny pigtails. I might tell Tibor that later in the evening. Or perhaps Amadé. Maybe neither, but just Ernõ. If I told Amadé he would answer with some nonsense rhyme like “Round pig, little pig, open mouth, and jig-jig-jig!” And he’d open his mouth and stick his fleshy tongue out between his thick lips as he always does. He’s laughing now and I can see his gold teeth. The actor released his hand. They went in through the revolving doors.

THE REVOLVING DOORS MOVED ROUND WITH them and they entered the café. It was the sort of hour at which cafés in provincial towns are empty but for the usual roster of dubious characters. The only signs of life were in the separate card rooms. In one room sat two lawyers, the editor of a local paper, and a very short man with hair carefully parted in the middle, his outfit selected with painstaking refinement. Opposite the door sat Havas. He was holding cards in his hand, his bald head glistening with drops of perspiration. Now and then he dipped his hand into his pocket and wiped his brow with a red handkerchief. The man who used to run the mill, now the owner of the town pawnbroker’s shop, declared, Three-card run, two aces, game, as they passed him. The actor and Ábel stopped to greet them. Havas made as if to rise from his chair but never moved: the vast body remained glued to his seat. He congratulated them. Your friends are already here. He seemed absent-minded, radiant with a kind of happiness that quickly drew him back to his cards. He declared himself in for the next round. The air in the card room was sour, worse than in the main part of the café. This might have been because the card players, having played for several hours, had grown careless of social niceties, or because it was difficult to air those little booths and the players were perspiring rather heavily. They threw their cigar butts on the floor. One or two of them spat on the remains and the dying stubs filled the lower regions of the café with acrid smoke. The gang sat in a little booth as they used to do when the café was still strictly out of bounds to them. The actor immediately sat himself at the head of the table. Ábel took his place by Ernõ.

Someone has cheated, he announced calmly.

He took out the cards and spread them out on the table. He had never felt so calm before.

I don’t want to take ages over this, he said, and noted with astonishment his own perfectly level voice.—I had no idea what I was going to do about it on my way here, what I was going to do or say, or if indeed I was going to say anything at all. But there we are: now I have said it. I don’t know if he has been cheating for long or whether this was the first time. He brought two aces with him, one heart and one acorn, and two tens, a leaf and a bell. While we were weighing things up he dropped a ten instead of an ace, or picked up three cards including a ten and didn’t ask for more, but secretly added an ace. Have a look at the cards: their backs resemble those of the ones we are using. It is impossible to tell the difference between our cards and the cheat’s.

Ernõ raised his head to take a deep breath, removed his pince-nez, and frowned furiously. Béla pressed the monocle he was wearing in public for the first time into his pale, puffy, acne-covered face. Tibor opened his mouth a little way and ground his teeth.

Let’s just go back to my place right now, said Béla. Right now. Go through my drawers, my cupboards, my books, try every pocket of all my suits, and why not cut the linings open while you’re at it? Do it all. Search the entire apartment. If you want to frisk my person you can do that immediately, right here.

You’re an idiot, said Tibor. Sit down.

Tibor’s face was not so red now. In fact he looked extremely pale. Under his blond hair his brow looked as white as a lime-washed wall. His lips were trembling.

He’s right, you’re an idiot, Ábel continued.—It’s not about frisking you. Not you, not me, not Ernõ, not Tibor. None of us is to be frisked. Lajos was only messing about. Look, here’s the proof. Two aces, two tens. Someone brought cards with him, either in his pocket or up his sleeve. One of us must therefore be cheating.

Keep your voice down, said the one-armed man.

They drew closer together.—What’s terrible about this, he continued in a low voice, is that we will never know who it was. Understand? Never. We could search everyone individually but we are, each of us, equally innocent and equally under suspicion. It’s not a matter of money. In any case, who came out as winners this afternoon?

They counted back. Béla and Ernõ seemed to have won roughly an equal number of times, Béla playing a high-risk game, Ernõ more cautiously. Ábel and Tibor both lost.

The loser might just as likely have cheated, said Ábel. Perhaps he cheated because he was losing. Everyone is equally under suspicion. You can treat me as a suspect too if you want. It is true that I was the one who discovered the cheating but it might be that I get a kick out of flirting with danger. I might have cheated then made a deliberate point of launching the accusation and taking pleasure in seeing all of you torturing yourselves. That’s why I say we would be idiots to frisk each other. We are all equally under suspicion.

Everyone is suspect, the one-armed one declared happily, grinning.

They weren’t listening to him. Ábel looked up with a pained expression on his face.

But maybe I wasn’t the cheat, he said slowly and speculatively. The strange thing is that we could imagine any one of us cheating so the cap fits all. It seems everyone that may be suspected might be guilty.

That’s an exaggeration, said the one-armed one.

The actor ordered ham with pickled cucumber, a softboiled egg, and tea with lemon. They didn’t look at each other. The actor hadn’t yet said anything; instead he thoughtfully adjusted his wig, and apart from a little chomping, began to eat in the most delicate and refined manner. He held the dessert spoon lightly with two fingers, cracked the shell of the egg with a demure, slightly amused tap, used the ends of two fingers to break off a pinch of bread and dip it into the yolk, cut the fatty edge off the ham with infinite care, and conducted a tricky surgical operation to excavate a sliver of muscle from it. He raised the knife with one hand like a conductor with his baton.

“That’s an exaggeration,” he pronounced with a mild but firm voice that brooked no contradiction.—“Lajos is right again! Have you noticed how Lajos has always been right recently? You exaggerate, my friend”—he turned forty-five degrees to address Ábel.—“We are all aware of your tender, sensitive soul.”

He stuffed a slice of ham into his mouth.

“Don’t take this amiss, but only very young people can say that kind of thing. My general experience of the world, or so I have observed on my travels, is that people get over everything. That is providing they survive of course.”

He bent over the egg and sniffed it.

“You are of a philosophical bent, that is all. Naturally, it is an unpleasant episode. We have every reason to believe what our friend Ábel says. One of you has cheated. It’s not such a bad thing.”

He clicked his tongue.

“What does it mean? Perhaps it wasn’t the money that he cheated for. People never know what they are going to do next. It’s a puzzle, a real puzzle. He came prepared of course, for he brought the cards. Maybe he just flirted with the thought. Life is just a big game, my friends.”

He touched the cards carelessly, put down his knife and fork, and leaned back. He looked around him in a dreamy fashion, surprised by the rapt attention he noted on their faces. He had got used to the fact that people never took serious note of what he said, that they heard him with mocking or indifferent expressions. In this company each word of his hit home. He gave a smirk of satisfaction.

“I am not thinking of the unmasking of our friend, Ábel,” he said with a dismissive gesture. “What are cards? What is money? It’s something else I have in mind. When through my friend Lajos’s kind attentions, I was invited to join your circle…my young friends, my very young friends…the first question I asked myself, having acknowledged the charming impression you immediately made on me, was what holds them together? Because something does hold you together. I have considerable experience in gauging human relationships. I said to myself: something joins them together but they do not speak of it. Yet each of them thinks about it. And one of them is cheating.”

He ate with great gusto. The ham slice became a ham sliver, the egg a hollow shell. Everything he picked up, even the salt cellar, seemed to be on familiar terms with him.

He spoke quietly, ceremoniously, with feeling. He even closed his eyes for a moment as if communing with himself. Havas’s voice could be heard from the next cubicle, and the slapping down of cards. A woman was moving through the café with a bucket and mop in her hand. The waiter sat by the billiard tables in the half-light, like a monk by the window of his cell at twilight. Lajos ran his eyes around the company with lively, friendly interest.

“It is probably unimportant that the person in question has now extended his cheating activities to a card game,” the actor continued. “He is your Judas, and we don’t really know him. He is someone I dare not even begin to suspect since the four of you are equally dear to me, and yet he must have been cheating you for a long time, cheating in his every word, his every look. The only reason he cheated at cards was because he wanted to round off his triumph in that way. He wanted to experience the full physical delight of having cheated you.

“There’s a nice expression: to sweep something under the carpet. It is an excellent expression. Don’t rack your brains, my friends. We are together. It’s been a wonderful day. You are no longer responsible to your masters. I thought we could celebrate the event tonight.”

The actor continued his meal with patent satisfaction. Here’s to a good time tonight, he said, his mouth full.

A calendar hung in the enclosure. Ábel stared at the date: May seventeenth.

We’ll have a nice little haroosh, said the actor and chomped a little more.

Ábel slowly gathered up the cards one by one. Technical terms of the game. Bank, clear-out, castle, take one, flush, no flush. Ernõ never offered up a flush. The cards clicked in Havas’s hands. Who is Havas? The proprietor of the town pawnbroker’s shop. Why has he been dreaming about him for weeks on end now? He dreams that Havas enters the room, wipes his walrus mustache with the back of his hand, and unbuttons his collar in leisurely fashion. He is laughing so hard his eyes are quite lost in the folds of fat. His breath is like the stink of a kitchen: it smells of lard and dishwater. Tibor’s mouth assumes that defiant suffering look.

He has put the cards in his pocket.

They watched each other carefully, bent over the table again, made eye contact with one brief last look, and immediately shifted their gaze. The waiter stood up and went to the door, turning on the lamps as he went. Guests were arriving. Two officers, then the town clerk. The Gypsies shuffled in.

HAVAS STOPPED AT THE DOOR OF THE CUBICLE. Cigar ash was clinging to his crumpled and swollen waistcoat. He took the cigar holder from his mouth.

Greetings, Amadé, he puffed, out of breath.

Greetings, Emil.

They turned to him.

“Your servant, gentlemen,” said Havas. “My compliments.”

“Soon be time for the May picnic,” said the one-armed one.

They had discussed the May picnic in the afternoon. It had been the one-armed one’s idea, and was generally welcomed. They liked the thought of it and talked about the recent mild weather. They were bound to agree if the one-armed man thought of it. They would hold the picnic in the grounds of The Peculiar on top of the hill. They had already sent a messenger to inform the innkeeper. They had reasons for choosing The Peculiar. The one-armed one had had a very productive afternoon in town. Everything was ready. He had ordered lanterns, had spoken with the teaching staff and got most of the alumni to agree. The Peculiar was already green and leafy. They could always go inside if they needed to at night. Cost of ticket, five crowns. Those paying no school fees half price. Dear Guests Are Cordially Invited. Havas sat down with them. He made sucking noises with his cigar holder. He said a May picnic was a jolly good idea. The weather was good, quite summery. He himself had never liked outdoor parties. One sits down at night on damp grass, one’s rear chills down, it leads to looseness of the bowels. Havas would have preferred the party to be in the Petõfi café.

“I went to nothing better than an ordinary state school,” he said with satisfaction, “but I have no hesitation in commending the Petõfi. It’s not much to look at. It’s a single-story building with a not particularly attractive entrance. But inside, gentlemen, a man can feel at home. The proprietor spent four years in jail for pimping. That was in peacetime. So he made mistakes. So what? It’s like being at home. I have even danced on the billiards table there. Should anyone wish to dance on the billiards table I propose the Petõfi café. A bottle of reservé costs eight crowns.”

He gazed sleepily in front of him. The actor finished eating.

“No news from your dear father?” the pawnbroker asked Tibor.

His voice was deferential and respectful. Amadé stared at his plate. Ábel raised his head and sneaked a look at Tibor. The one-armed one looked bored. Tibor moved. He made as if to leap to his feet.

No news, he said.

“A hero,” Havas declared. “The colonel is a hero. The hero of Valjevo.”

He drew his chair closer to the table.

“Now here’s a remarkable thing, gentlemen, for young Lajos is a hero too. The hero of Isonzo. And now young Master Tibor too will have the opportunity of showing what he can do. A heroic family.”

“That’s enough, you old fool,” said Ernõ.

The pawnbroker gave a forced laugh. They breathed a little more easily. Ernõ was the only one who dared talk to the pawnbroker like this. The pawnbroker was a friend of Amadé. When people met the pawnbroker they tended to avert their eyes.

The pawnbroker was professional and polite in his official capacity. The article please. Write it down, miss: a lady’s gold pocket watch, 80 grams, estimated value 120, deposit 100, less handling and interest 4.60, there we are 95.40. Next please. He did not look up. He didn’t even look up when Tibor brought him the silver. The well-known Prockauer silverware, complete with monogram. Aristocratic Prockauer. The actor had talked with him that morning. They were taking his mother into the hospital for two days, for tests. That was six months ago already: October 13, 1917. Date elapsed: April 13, 1918. Write it down, miss. One set of silverware for 24, 22 kilograms, with monogram. Estimated value 800. Deposit 600. He didn’t look up: his nimble fingers pushed the money under the glass screen.

“I, for example, would never eat only cold ham for supper,” said Havas. “It’s not the food, I believe. My friend Amadé claims it’s the diet. But please, what use is a diet to me? I lose not an ounce of weight, I get a headache, and it’s such agony I want to curse all day. A body needs decent sustenance I say. And a spot of exercise. Love has a slimming effect too. Love, gentlemen, take it from one who knows. But how is one to find a little love nowadays? It’s scarce. A man has to rely on himself.”

“Fat pig,” said Ernõ and turned away from him.

They laughed awkwardly. So did the actor. The actor was showing his false white teeth as though Ernõ had said something remarkably witty. They cackled as though compelled to do so. Ábel blushed. There was something painful yet welcome about the way Ernõ had addressed Havas. Havas weighed close to two hundred and ninety pounds. Ernõ knew that unless a miracle occurred everything depended on him: they were all dependent on Havas being in a good mood. Tibor’s mother hadn’t yet noticed the silverware was missing. But the colonel might arrive home any day on leave or wounded and he might decide to inspect it. It did not bear thinking about what would happen if the silverware was not in its usual place. The colonel had once knocked the driver of a dray cold with his bare fist. It wasn’t just Lajos and Tibor’s fate at stake: it was all their fates. If the silverware was lost, if Havas didn’t want to hang on to it until they found some money, it was possible the colonel wouldn’t stop short of setting the lawyers on them. Their affairs would not bear close examination. It was a private matter. All that had happened in the last six months was their business and no one else’s. If only Havas would grant them a few weeks’ grace. Just until they had finished their training. True, the matter of the silverware would have to be faced even so. The colonel might follow them to the front and threaten them with a sound whipping even in the heat of battle. There was no limit to the power of fathers.

Ernõ spoke to Havas as though it were degrading to address remarks to him. The pawnbroker put up with it. Ernõ had some hold on the pawnbroker, though no one knew what that hold was. Maybe he knew something about him, was aware of a piece of dirty business, had information about his usury. Ernõ would turn away whenever the pawnbroker approached them. He pulled a painful face, as if the disgusting sight were enough to make him spit. The pawnbroker pretended not to notice Ernõ, nor to hear his insults. He hastened to agree with anything he said. He kept smiling. The hairs of his mustache bristled as he smiled. Tibor said Havas was frightened of Ernõ.

The actor looked as if he were daydreaming and occasionally glanced away.

“It is all settled,” he told Tibor. “Havas is a friend and he knows you to be gentlemen. There is nothing in the conditions that obliges him…He won’t demand anything.”

Havas did not demand anything. The money, like all money in the last few months, drained invisibly away: they were having to save Béla with it. Amadé was embarrassed, since he too was in receipt of some. He kept quiet for now. He smiled. He could smile so stiffly while looking straight ahead that one would think he had a glass eye. His bluish jowls sat stolidly in the vent of his collar. His brow practically shone. It was like precious china. He smiled, a toothpick dangling from his lips, and looked fixedly into the distance with his glass eyes. The pawnbroker fitted a new cigar into the holder. They stared at each other, smiling icily. The actor gave an almost imperceptible shrug. They both smiled.

“Master Ernõ is right,” said the pawnbroker. “I am a fat pig. I have got used to it. What can I do about it? So I’m fat. Should I torture myself with the thought? I am the kind of fat man who is fat because he eats a lot. Amadé is the kind of fat man who eats practically nothing and yet is still fat. I’d die if I couldn’t eat properly. A fine, solid piece of roast pork, in a nice crispy roasted skin, accompanied by potatoes boiled with onions and some pickled gherkins: it’s a pleasure biting at the crisp skin. That’s the stuff for me. And lángos with cabbage. This is my fate in life. You should try to see me as the helpless creature of fate.”

Everyone looked at him and Ábel noted the pained courteous smile on Tibor’s face. It was this smile that he particularly liked about him. There was something distracted and troubled about it, a kind of noblesse oblige. Tibor was trying to smile indulgently at Havas’s corpulence. Béla was giving him a fish-eyed look as if he had never seen him before. Ernõ was screwing up his nose.

“Yes, just imagine it…,” he said with a shudder of disgust.

“You should see me undressed,” Havas continued, calm and solemn. He drew loudly on his cigar holder. He nodded. “Yes, terrible. And I should also confess that I wear a girdle. Not a full girdle, just a thing that goes round my stomach. When I take it off my belly simply drops.”

He surveyed the assembled company. The actor gave a croak.

“Are you staying with us, Emil?”

The pawnbroker rose slowly to his feet. He put on his hat so it was tipped back over his head. His brow was glistening with sweat.

“Thank you for the kind invitation,” he said quietly. “I will not remain with the gentlemen tonight.”

Tibor made a sudden movement.

“I would like to speak to you tomorrow, Mr. Havas.”

The pawnbroker’s eyes disappeared under his swollen lids.

“At your service, Mr. Prockauer.”

“Not at your shop.”

“Just as you please,” said Havas. “Two o’clock at my apartment then. At your service.” He looked around. “Perhaps Master Ábel would like to come too,” he added.

Ábel blushed. Tibor turned away. “Yes, I’ll come too,” said Ábel quickly.

The pawnbroker nodded as if he thought this the most natural thing. He did not shake hands with anyone. Once he had gone Tibor sat back down and rubbed his eyes.

“And now we shall have the most splendid party,” said the actor.