The ship, becalmed in the middle of the flat sea, was sinking. Now there was no longer any expectation of a saving wind that might fill the sails and propel the ship out of this dead calm – everybody understood this more and more, as silently and without expression they toasted each other’s health. The palinka that Laci the hotelier kept pouring in their glasses was these mariners’ last hope. They drank and followed the orders of their captain, who somewhere upstairs, above their empty heads, was himself lying motionless on top of his woman.
Maybe the only thing they could still hear – or maybe they just imagined it, like the words the dead can supposedly hear in those few hours before the soul at last departs the body, this indifferent nature, and smuggles itself across the border we carry inside us – the only thing they had heard that night was the distant neighing of wild horses, who were now already grazing in the windless calm of the morning.
Horses beyond count were grazing peacefully in the middle of Main Square. All those strong black, white and brown animal bodies were tugging indifferently at the first spring grass, just a stone’s throw from the Hotel Dobray. And truly, these bone-weary, inebriated soldiers could no longer distinguish mirage from reality. Kolosváry had once enjoyed reading adventure novels, and he had even been at sea, unlike his comrades, who had seen only Lake Balaton and never the ‘big water’, as they called it, so he was in a way acquainted with, or was at least trying to call to mind, the feeling – that feeling – when you are surrounded by sea and held in the grip of a calm. He could almost describe the anxiety, even the despair, of those who wait idly for days, or weeks, lost in the endless blue. One by one, they were all succumbing to that strange, suppressed fear of the image that lies in every person: the image or mirage or maybe just illusion, that you are looking death in the eye and neither die nor go mad.
But who knows for sure what it’s like to be dead or mad, Private Kolosváry had been thinking that night as he crouched half-dazed by the open window in the Hotel Dobray, carving pictures of horses into the floral wallpaper with his rusty, blunt bayonet. He had begun by carving one of the horses he used to ride on the grasslands of Hungary, before this accursed war caught up with him and sent him to do his duty in this godforsaken town, where after all this time he still understood nothing, not even who these people were, all these fine gentlemen and ladies who couldn’t decide whether or not they were Hungarians.
For although they spoke Hungarian and were full of praise for the Crown of St Stephen and for Budapest manners, which in fact they esteemed mainly from hearsay, even he, a simple soldier, who thought mostly about the freedom he was still breathing on the grasslands – even he had understood that these people were different, and now he was convinced of it, no matter what airs they put on or how high and mighty they acted; somewhere in the background, behind those well-studied words, something very different lay in their hearts, but they refused to acknowledge it.
He saw the fuss they made of József Sárdy, who wasn’t the least bit better than this debauched army of his.
‘All they care about is money,’ Kolosváry mumbled as he pressed the dull point of his bayonet even harder into the wall.
‘What’d you say? What money? Can’t you see they’re just grazing?’ Géza, leaning at the next window, was slurring his words. Ever since the orders were given, he hadn’t lowered his eye from the scope of his rifle. Géza was the most obedient but also the most terrified soldier of them all, so he was all the more courageously arming himself with palinka. There were always problems when he was on guard duty, and shooting was almost a certainty, so that even Laci the waiter had had to intervene with the soldier’s superiors, because in his zeal, fear or drunkenness (God only knew which), he would often fire at guests who left the coffee house at night ‘to get some air’, as Laci said, although it was usually to have a piss or puke.
‘Grazing, right; they’re grazing their little fillies, and their warm arses, too,’ Kolosváry replied, completely absorbed in his carvings, which by morning had covered the wall beneath the window, through which cold, dense mists were stealing into the soldiers’ creaking bones.
15
He felt a cold, bony hand on his naked back. Before opening his eyes, which were buried in the damp hair of a woman, he tried to count. The bell in the Lutheran church was chiming, which in all these months he had never heard. The ringing was still echoing when that hand returned. It was somewhere below the back of his neck, as if someone had placed a heavy slab of marble on top of him which was pressing him against that silent female body. A chill such as he had never experienced, as if it was not of this world, as if something without shape or name was shining more intensely than the sun, this strange chill, neither pleasant nor alien, was pressing down on him with ever greater force. The body beneath him was suffocating, but still it did not move, did not even wake up. Wherever their insensate flesh was touching, as if they were clasped in a vice-like grip or at the height of sweetest bliss, which in fact had never occurred between them, there were puddles of cold, odourless water.
József opened his eyes when the feeling he couldn’t name became unbearable. His head was flooded with a horrible white stain – it was like sinking in quicklime – and at the same moment he realized that somewhere his lost conscience was trying to make itself heard. It was like the time when, in some entranceway in Budapest, when he was still just a child, he first trampled a nest of birds. And now he again heard that unbearable chirping, the straining of tiny throats, which had diminished with every blow of his heel. Afterwards, feeling completely lost yet also giddy with power, he had run towards the tall front doors. He wanted to get away as quickly as possible, to hide in his mother’s kitchen, but the doors were stuck. For a few seconds he had screamed as if he was being chased by death, of which he knew only what he had learned from the scary stories recounted by the older boys in the courtyard. They had told him: ‘A person who kills isn’t afraid of death.’ Then, suddenly, he had come to his senses and was instantly calm. He was sitting on the damp, grimy floor. The entranceway was dark and full of silence.
József lifted himself off the billiard table, where he had been lying in an embrace with a woman who for him had no name, and walked barefoot to the small balcony. It was only when he was outside that he put the woman’s silk dressing gown on his naked body; it did not even reach his knees. It was dark outside, as dark as that entranceway had been, which was still in his head. Nothing was moving; only somewhere in the distance, beyond the land that, like a black, ravenous sea, was eating into the houses on the far edge of town, there were flashes and muffled explosions from artillery fire.
It was now that József Sárdy, secretary of the Office of the Special Military Tribunal, thought of death. He knew it was close; he felt it like an invisible shadow clinging to his body with a cold hand.
He succumbed to reveries entirely unrelated to his present life. But still, he asked himself, where have those years gone when he was learning to survive on the streets of Budapest? It’s not proper, it suddenly occurred to him, for an officer whom fate has appointed to lead the final battle but who in fact makes no real decisions since all the deciding is done by others, which is how it’s always been in this phoney life of his – it’s not proper for such an officer to indulge his memories. And again he thought: I can’t walk away now; some higher necessity has appointed me to show for at least once in my life what I’m made of, and if death is the only way out, then that is what I’ll choose; it’s the only thing those lost boys from my street will appreciate, who are now probably hiding in some damp, dark entranceway taking their rage out on birds, if there are any birds left in Budapest.
József no longer believed that killing could save you from death, but he did believe that, for a soldier, it was the only way to fight it.
16
In the tall windows of the Hotel Dobray, which looked out on Main Square, rifles were still pointing into the night. Somewhere deep inside, a paraffin lamp was glowing. Silence lay all around, disturbed only by the relentless scratching beneath one of the windows, as if the hotel was infested with termites.
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