The Rebels

by Sándor Márai

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

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

  Béla stood up, fiddling absentmindedly with his gloves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Utterly different,” Béla nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “They? Who are they?” asked Ernõ.

  They all began to shout at once.

  “The locksmiths for a start!”

  “The lawyers!”

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

  “All of them! All of them!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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