by Sándor Márai
“Six hundred crowns,” she repeated. Her hand grasped the air. Six hundred. She collapsed back onto her pillow and stared straight ahead of her with a frozen smile. Their father is fighting on the front. Six hundred. She let out a few faint shrieks and vigorously shook her head.
Tibor sat on the bed next to her, put his hands together, and waited for her to calm down. “Don’t excite yourself, Mother,” he said. “I see you don’t understand. But don’t get overexcited.”
He stood up.
“Something will come along.”
“Six hundred crowns,” Mother repeated. “Six hundred silver crowns. Good lord. St. Louis.”
She had to be laid down on the pillow again. Incomprehensible sounds bubbled from her lips. Tibor put his hands on his mother’s brow and indicated to the one-armed one that it was hopeless.
“There’s one hope left,” he said and leaned close to Lajos. “I’ll speak with him this afternoon.”
The one-armed one solemnly nodded but never took his eyes off their mother who was gasping quietly now, her closed eyes mimicking sleep. Just as solemnly, he leaned forward with an expression of utmost curiosity and carefully examined his mother, as if he had discovered some new feature on her. Curiosity and confusion mingled in his smile: he was wholly absorbed in her.
“In The Peculiar tonight,” said Tibor quietly by way of farewell, and tiptoed towards the door.
“Tonight,” echoed the one-armed one, but his eyes never left his mother and he placed a finger to his lips, demanding silence. Once Tibor had closed the door he stood up silently to look down on her. He gazed at her for a few seconds, listening for any noise, his curiosity taking on an officious air. Suddenly Mother looked right at him and the two pairs of eyes met with hardly any distance between them. They regarded each other, round-eyed, the way people stare at each other for the first or the last time. A sudden rigid horror blazed in Mother’s eyes, like two safety lamps, and her dull eyes started to burn. She raised a hand to her breast in defense. The one-armed one sat down again, as if determined not to move from here until he had discovered something.
The maid entered and cleared the table. Mother wanted to give some instructions, she wanted to sit up, to say something. Her eyes followed the girl with undisguised anxiety but the one-armed one raised his finger to his lips and indicated that she should be silent. Mother began to shiver, her teeth were chattering. Once the maid had gone out he pulled his chair closer to her and leaned forward.
You have to give us the money, Mother, he said, his voice calm and quiet.
There was no severity in his voice, no hint of threat, but Mother immediately closed her eyes as if in a faint. From time to time she opened them to find the boy still there, still calm, insistent, his gaze never leaving her, and she closed her eyes again. They remained like this for a long time, unmoving. Mother stopped trembling as the odd sidelong glance assured her that the boy was still at his post. Time passed infinitely slowly. Mother drew the nightshirt tightly about her chest, closed her eyes, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. She knew there was no longer any point in doing anything, but before surrendering herself she would stiffen, play dead as a termite does when it senses danger. The one-armed one drew the chair still closer, propped himself on the edge of the bed, and made himself comfortable.
ÁBEL SLEPT AT THE PECULIAR. THERE WERE NO curtains so he woke early. Through the glass the mountain and the pine forest had just emerged from their covers in the warmth, their shapes lazy and rounded, like a plump girl’s. He sat down at the window in shirtsleeves and held his face up to the sun. One could get drunk on the sun on an empty stomach. He had slept deep and remembered nothing. Such giddy happiness flooded through him that he didn’t dare move in case the giddiness vanished. His body warmed through, his frozen limbs relaxed.
He had to be in town by ten. The class photograph that was to join the others in the gallery, the gallery that included their fathers, was to be taken in the yard of the institution. He picked up his clothes. The building was deserted: the owner was hanging lanterns in the garden. Aimlessly he walked up and down the room among the accumulated hoard of things. It was all junk, boring, rubbish. He spun the globe and waited for it to stop. He carefully put his finger on Central Africa. Good heavens, he thought. What does it matter that the actor has kissed Tibor Prockauer?
He hadn’t gone home that night. When they parted in front of the theater he took a few steps homeward then turned and took the route leading to The Peculiar. He ran part of the way to get out of town as fast as he could, then slowed by the river. The night was warm and bright. He never considered going home. Perhaps I shall never go home again, he thought vaguely. There’s a change coming, something different from everything up till now, something other than Etelka or Papa or the teachers or Tibor or the actor, perhaps something much simpler and nicer, everything’s up for grabs, the whole thing needs careful, independent, rational thought. But that’s just a feeble consolation, he thought. The various buildings of The Peculiar glimmered white in the moonlight, picturesque, improbable. He crept quietly up to the room, the musty closeted smell mingling with the scent of rum, choking him. He opened the window, threw himself across the bed, and immediately fell asleep. The actor was coming towards him, his chest bare, his wig crooked. Tibor’s head fell back. Ábel was tugging at the actor’s arm. It’s cooled down! It’s a starry night! He was bellowing.
The dream faded. He slept deeply, his body still.
He put on his clothes and set off for town. He was hot in his black formal garments. A tuft of hair was sticking from his pocket. He drew out the wig, then, looking round to make sure no one could see, threw it away. The hairpiece lay on the road like a squashed furry animal. He raised it with his toe and gave it a disgusted kick. Whoever once grew this tuft of hair, he said to himself, is, from this moment, dead forever. He hurried past the repairman’s fence. He had lost his hat somewhere the previous night. The air was pure and clean, the sound of bells swam in it. May eighteenth. Friday. The photographer. He wanted to have a word with Tibor afterwards. Then it’s Havas at two. He might look in on his aunt. In the evening they would come out to The Peculiar. None of this was of particular interest really. He stopped, looked round, and for a moment considered going back to The Peculiar and waiting for them till evening. But then he thought he had to speak to Tibor. He lengthened his stride.
Over the fences peeped the branches of various fruit trees. The previous afternoon’s rain had beaten down the flowers. He passed the swimming pool, then stopped on the bridge to look at the yellow-colored river of his childhood, now in flood, the long grass bending over it into the water, his nose crinkling to the sharp sour smell.
Judge Kikinday, the man the mandarin had condemned to death, was just crossing the bridge.
Ábel leaned over the rails. If there was any justice Kikinday would have died long ago because it was three years now since the mandarin had sentenced him, in the belief that that would be the simplest course to take. Kikinday had himself sentenced several men to death, and hanged seven, overseeing the executions personally. The last was a Gypsy.
The mandarin was Ábel’s first friend, his own private discovery, the only mythical figure he had not found in old tales, but had personally invented. Maybe somebody once said something about what might happen if a mandarin in China were to press a button. Soon after Ábel rebelled against the town he found what remained of an old, dysfunctional bell, and whenever his enemies got him down he pressed the button and arranged their execution. Say he told a lie, for example, and his lie had been discovered: the accuser had to perish. In three short years he had been obliged to order four persons’ executions and in three cases the order had been carried out. Szikár was the first, the biology master who had hit him in fifth grade. The second was Canon Lingen, who had spied on them in the park. The third was Fiala, his classmate in sixth grade, who had betrayed a secret Ábel had entrusted to him. And the fourth was Kikinday, Colonel Prockauer’s friend, who had threatened to w
rite a letter about their doings to his father when he came across them in a bar.
The mandarin was Ábel’s personal secret, someone he never spoke about, not even to the gang. The mandarin lived somewhere in China in a room with yellow wallpaper and had long sharp fingernails, a two-foot-long pigtail, and sat at a lacquered table with the mechanism on top of it. He had but to touch the button with one of those fingernails and someone somewhere in the world would perish. The mandarin was neither good nor evil: he administered justice disinterestedly. If someone in San Francisco looked askance at somebody, or spoke roughly, the mandarin would frown and examine the matter and, having done so, take action. His power extended over the whole planet. He touched the button with those refined long fingernails of his, a button that was no different in Ábel’s opinion from the button on a common doorbell, and someone in a distant corner of the world dropped dead, his head flopping over. Very few people knew this. People in general believed that Szikár, the biology master, drank himself to death, that Canon Lingen died of hardening of the arteries, and that Fiala’s early death was due to tuberculosis. Ábel, however, knew that all this was beside the point: the true cause of death was the mandarin. Ábel regarded himself as the mandarin’s local representative and that it was incumbent on him to act in a disinterested yet, of course, more conscientious spirit in such matters of judgment. The mandarin was Ábel’s most closely guarded secret. Everyone is happy to play the hangman in their imagination. Of the four sentences handed out by Ábel, judgments conducted in utmost secrecy under conditions of emergency in a form of martial law, three were approved by the mandarin and carried out with remarkable expedition. Kikinday, on the other hand, who had been sentenced some years ago, was clearly in a state of conspicuous health, and crossed the bridge now, panting a little but with the greatest possible dignity. Ábel knew the mandarin was simply delaying the execution. The game had long been imbued with a greater significance than he had earlier thought possible. He had recently sought out the instrument of execution, the dysfunctional hall doorbell that had been gathering dust in a drawer. After the resolution of the Fiala case Ábel felt tortured by uncertainty. The judgment, though not in itself unjust, might have been a touch severe, and maybe it would have been enough to commute it to lifelong hard labor, condemning Fiala to work out his time in a bank or the tax office. One can be wrong, thought Ábel. Now here was this Kikinday character…
“Nebulo nebulorum,” the condemned addresses him with the impeccable courtesy so often remarked in town. “And how do we like being an adult?”
Ábel looks up at Kikinday’s swollen face, the black teeth grimly glimmering under the Kaiser Wilhelm mustache, the whey-colored eyes swimming in the air above Ábel’s head. They cross the bridge together on their way to town. Kikinday asks after Ábel’s father and inquires in due patriarchal manner when Ábel and his friends hope to join up and move to the front. It was the way he questioned Lajos too before he went out. There is no malice in the question, for Kikinday stops every young man between seventeen and nineteen years of age and makes the same inquiry concerning their military plans.
They make their way slowly past the line of poplars, ever closer to town. A thin fog hangs over the river, the kind of early fog expected on very hot days.
Kikinday observes encouragingly that military training takes much less time now than it did in his day.
“You are lucky not to know the meaning of real training,” he sighs. “How would you know? You haven’t hung about in barracks, followed by three or four weeks of drill, no, you can go straight to the front. In my time,” he stretched his arms wide as he always did when talking about “his time,” a time he did not describe in any precise detail but indicated with a gesture that spoke of some half-forgotten, never-to-return golden age of mankind, “in my time we had to squat, lie on our stomachs, and march in the baking heat. Your generation? Three weeks and you’re off.”
Kikinday had wasted few opportunities in recent years to wave his hat at the younger generation as they departed in cattle trucks. He was always first among the local dignitaries at the station bidding farewell to the troops: this role befitted his social standing and established him as a friend to youth.
They took leave of each other by the courtroom. Kikinday made Ábel promise to inform him when he was about to set off on his travels. With the greatest tact Kikinday always referred to such military leave-takings as “setting off on one’s travels.” Tower-like he made his way up the cool steps. Ábel watched him reach one of the landings. He began to feel sick. He himself ascended the three steps that formed the entrance to the school with great care. The class was standing in a semicircle under the linden tree. He squeezed himself in at the end of a line, the form master sitting at the center with an expression of the greatest historical gravity while Béla and Tibor lay like two chained mastiffs couchant at his feet. The photographer had set up his equipment complete with black cloth and was barking out a few words of instruction, the last words of instruction they would ever hear in this yard. At the very last moment, just as the camera was about to click, he quickly spun around and turned his back to it. Ernõ noticed and did the same. And so the class ceremonially entered the school gallery’s version of eternity.
“Future generations may well scratch their heads,” said Ábel, “wondering who they were, those two figures turning their backs on immortality.”
The various groups dispersed while they hung back, loafing in the sunshine, sleepless and shivering. Béla’s teeth were chattering from exhaustion.
“I must sleep,” he said. “I can’t go on now. Till tonight then.”
“Till tonight.”
Ernõ suddenly butted in.
“I went by his place this morning,” he whispered.
They stopped and listened with downcast eyes, somewhat coldly and against their wills, as he quickly continued.
“He wouldn’t let me in. He spoke through the door, saying he was all right, he felt fine. He said not to wait for him.”
A deep silence followed his words and he himself suddenly fell silent. Tibor lit a cigarette and offered a light to the others.
“Then we don’t wait,” he shrugged, perfectly courteous. He stood there for a while, then extended his hand for them to shake. “Very well then, tonight.”
Then he linked arms with Ábel.
They had to wait at the swimming pool. It was still the hour set aside for women. They sat down on a bench by the ticket office. The smell of rotting boards, damp sludge, and the familiar stench of stale underwear hit them. They could hear the women’s cries.
“Hairdressers,” said Tibor.
The leaden weight of the heat smoothed the water and gave it a metallic sheen. The heat was sticky, dense, almost tangible. Tibor leaned back and started whistling.
“Please stop whistling,” said Ábel.
Tibor examined his nails. In a distracted singsong voice he declared: “I don’t like the look of Mother. Her behavior was distinctly odd this morning. But what I meant to say was…we’re seeing Havas at two.”
He whistled a few more bars and blinked at the river, his mind elsewhere.
“What I really meant to say,” he continued, “was that half an hour ago I walked into the local recruiting office. The commanding officer there is a reliable officer of my father’s. I volunteered. He in turn gave me permission to enlist as a volunteer. I start tomorrow morning, first thing.”
When Ábel did not respond he put his hand on his knee.
“Don’t be angry, Ábel. I just can’t go on like this.” He raised his arm and indicated everything around him. “I can’t go on like this,” he repeated. “There’s nothing I can do about it.”
He rolled a cigarette, sat down on the wooden railings of the bridge, and dangled his feet over it.
“What do you think we should do? I think everyone could take away whatever was important to them from The Peculiar tonight…I must return the saddle whatever happens.”
He licked the cigarette, lit it, and when he had waited for some time in vain for a response, he repeated uncertainly:
“What do you think?”
Ábel stood up, leaned against the boards of the cabin. His skin looked gray and pale but his voice was calm.
“So it’s over.”
“I think so.”
“The gang, The Peculiar, are all over?”
“I think so.”
“In that case there’s something I must tell you,” he said and took a deep breath. “I should have told you long ago, I wanted to tell you. Please don’t be cross, Tibor, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
He rested his head against the wall. In a plain, almost chatty way he said: “I had to tell you this just once. I love you. Does that surprise you?” He stretched out his arms, and quickly, feverishly continued, his voice reassuring. “Don’t be angry, but I’ve suffered a great deal on your account. More than a year now. I myself can’t explain what it is I love about you. I had to tell you sometime. Maybe it’s because you are beautiful. You’re not, if I may say, particularly bright. You must forgive me saying so because I’m an unhappy creature. I would give you everything I own, whatever I am likely to own in the future. Do you believe me?”
Tibor leapt off the railings, threw away his cigarette, seized Ábel’s arm, and tugged at it frantically.
“You must swear!”
He was shaking Ábel with all his power in sheer desperation.
“I swear…”
“You must swear that you’ll never mention this again.”
“I’ll never mention it again.”
“You want to remain friends?”
“Yes.”
“So not another word about it, all right?”
“Not a word.”
They were breathing hard. Tibor let go of Ábel’s arm, sat down on the bench, and put his head in his hands. Ábel slowly crossed the bridge, stopped, leaned against the railing and out over the water. Someone’s feet were tapping on the bridge behind them. Tibor waited until the steps died away, then moved over to Ábel, leaned on his elbows beside him, and put an arm around his shoulder. He had tears in his eyes.
