Its voice would be dissolving like salt until the water was as saturated as the sea. This mournful, deep singing was also heard by the man, still standing in the middle of the intersection looking somewhere far down the empty street. Or maybe by now it was a different song, the one that people here once said would never die.
At that moment a group of men came staggering out of Türk’s pub, which stood on the corner. They stopped in the doorway a moment, surprised, it seemed, by the morning light. There were five, maybe six, of them. Three were carrying musical instruments, either in their hands or strapped on their shoulders. The others had their arms around each other and were leaning against the door, which the exasperated publican was doing all he could to shut. Franz Schwartz watched them from the road. They were all somehow alike. All tired and wearing long, unbuttoned and rumpled overcoats. Their eyes were on fire. It was impossible to say if they had been taking leave of each other before going off to their separate fates, or if they had stayed up all night with the musicians out of sheer happiness. Maybe they knew that the slaughter would soon be over and they would remain here forever.
‘Play something, Lajči, play!’ the one in the middle shouted. He was standing on the highest step supporting himself on his two mates, who were struggling to keep him on his feet. The men with the musical instruments were slowly backing away. They were watching the drunken trio and roguishly bowing to them. They had had enough, and had certainly made good money off these drunks that night. Still, they knew it wasn’t over. These men would want more music. Now, with both their glasses and pockets empty, their hearts would burn all the more. They would want this music, this sad, endless music, which would ring out overhead even after they were gone. The ensemble was already in the street when one of its members, who was carrying an enormous double bass that reverberated even as he walked, looked back towards the pub. The three musicians leaned against the garden fence, as if resting, and then took off their hats. The gauntlet was thrown down. This was the men’s last chance for sadness and joy. The tall one, who a moment earlier had been stumbling and leaning on his mates’ shoulders, now instantly gathered his wits and was almost sober. He wriggled out of his friends’ safe grip and stepped forward. Holding himself erect, he walked towards the fence. For a brief second, by a table in the pub’s garden, which was anticipating the spring, he stopped and gazed past the heads of the musicians. It was then he must have seen Franz Schwartz, who was standing at the intersection looking right back at him.
Did the man recognize him? Or did that dark shape lit by the early-morning sun, in middle of the empty intersection, simply surprise and maybe frighten him, too? Or even remind him that life was not merely a nostalgic photograph in which we are captured by chance?
‘Come on, Lajči, play for us!’ he then said in a loud voice, too loud to be intended for them alone. ‘Play something for all of us, something sad,’ he added and, to the musicians’ obvious approval, took off his watch and dropped it in one of their hats. The ensemble began to play.
The fiddle on the train, which was just now crossing the Mura River, had nearly stopped reverberating. But now it started up again. The train was rumbling across the iron bridge without slowing down. Everybody was still on board. That morning, nobody had fled. The only one who remained on this side of the river, in a forgotten, stagnant pool, was the dead fiddler.
7
The old porcelain sky was polished to a shine. It lay motionless above the black earth. Like a coffee cup someone had long ago turned upside down on its saucer. Perhaps this was the work of one of the many fortune tellers who read coffee grounds. Now the black sediment had covered the saucer, and high above it, in the blue of the sky, only small traces could be seen, broken signs and mysterious shapes, which only the most inspired could interpret. That morning one of these women kept glancing at the black sludge as if she was looking at the sky; then she’d merely shake her head and spit out a thick, grimy dollop of phlegm. She was sitting on the front steps of the Hotel Dobray and every so often would turn her eyes away from the witchery in her right hand and look up Main Street. There was nobody to be seen, which was a good omen. For it was best, the women said, if the person they saw in the coffee grounds was never seen by living eyes. Then, with a deep, rasping sound, she hawked up phlegm from her entire torso, so much that the child she carried inside might soon be left dry, and she spat all this life into her free hand. She squeezed and rolled the glob around in her hand a few moments, then opened it. The thing she held in her hand now slowly started to expand, like rising dough or boiling milk. At that very moment, in the empty, glazed sky, a speck appeared, or rather, a shadow the size of an eye. Now the woman fixed her eyes directly on that nearly imperceptible shadow in the sky and mumbled: ‘Chicken, chicken coop, chicken eye, I see ya, I’m looking right at ya …’
Then she put the big green eye that had risen on her palm into the coffee cup, and again turned the cup upside down on the saucer. The world was reassembled; sky and earth, which had been divided, were again safe in the woman’s warm hand. Only nobody knew just what that big, green, slimy eye was seeing.
In any case, in these thick, black coffee grounds lay a town that had had many names. Every ruler who had ever for a time claimed this lost and forgotten child as his own had given it a new name. It had been this way ever since the first inscriptions in the fourteenth century, when it was mentioned as Zombotho. A settlement on the territory of Belmura. In 1366, this settlement was first called a town, with the name written as Murazumbota. Experts agree that the town’s earliest name should be ascribed a Slavic origin, but later, when the entire region between the Mura and Raba rivers came under Hungarian rule, the Hungarian designation became official. Thus in the oldest clerical records the name is preserved with the prefix Mura, Murai or Muray, all of which derive from the name of the river. So it was for centuries.
And so it was, too, on that Sunday in March in the year 1945, when the days of the Hungarian occupation were numbered. The child was soon to be rechristened – which could everywhere be felt – but the soul-damaged, aggrieved gentlemen in the uniforms of Hungarian officers, who were assembled that morning at the bar of the Hotel Dobray, refused to believe it. They were all staring at the telephone and drinking. They hadn’t slept the night before or, indeed, for several nights in a row. Their women had been lying alone all this time in unmade, sweat-stained beds. The men, who in the street or at military headquarters conveyed an image of manliness and heartlessness, had in recent days been avoiding the staircase that led to the hotel’s upper floor. Always a little drunk, sometimes very drunk, and with bloody saliva in their mouths, they were acting like boys who wanted to spend just one more night with their sweethearts but in their thoughts were already home, somewhere far away, where what awaited them was something they feared more than all the madness and bloodshed here. They knew that from now on things would never again be as they had once been.
The telephone, which had been placed in the middle of the long counter, remained silent. The soldiers and junior officers were smoking dry tobacco and knocking back glasses of spirits. Everything was gradually running out, the same way their patience was dwindling and their anxiety increasing, the same way their tobacco was running out and the fear inside them was swelling. The hotel’s coffee house was in a more or less woeful condition. For the past month, virtually none of the townsfolk had set foot there. The mood was no different on the other side of the counter. The man tending the bar, the only employee left, who had stayed out of some coffee-house ethic no one now understood – Laci, the maître d’hôtel, was comporting himself like the captain of a slowly sinking ship. His cooks, cellarmen, barmen and managers had long ago fled. Laci struggled on alone, waiting tables, purchasing liquor in the middle of the night from black marketeers who mercilessly fleeced him, washing dishes and carrying drunken soldiers on his shoulders to the storeroom to sleep it off. He no longer had the strength to deliver them to the women upstairs. The only thing he truly neglected these days was the cleaning, which had never been his job, and he wasn’t about to take it on now.
Cleaning, tidying up, scrubbing floors – that was his inner boundary and he couldn’t cross it. So with each passing day the hotel looked more and more like the kind of seedy dive that could be found in growing numbers in cellars all around here. The only difference was that he still had the feeling that he was operating legally, that he was abiding by the ordinances and regulations which were posted on the walls. In his almost mad perseverance, even when everything