on their filthy bed sheets. Laci and his ladies were the last mariners on board, the only remaining hope for order, lawfulness and professional ethics in the black coffee slime that was relentlessly engulfing everything.
‘Get ready, men, the Secretary is coming,’ said Laci the hotelier; he was the first to hear a woman’s cries and the gallop of male feet descending the hotel’s creaking staircase. It wasn’t so long ago that gentlemen would come down these same stairs with slow, tired footsteps, from the casino that had been operating for many years on the first floor.
Laci could still recall the mornings he would wait by the door for the last of the gamblers, who left the hotel feeling relieved and with that mysterious smile on their faces. There were usually gypsies waiting for them on the doorstep, who had come here for one last dinar. These musicians performed in pubs and coffee houses around town and beyond, but in the morning they would come here, since the casino was open all night. Sometimes several bands would stand beneath the chestnuts all at the same time, all waiting, almost competing to see who could play the saddest, most heart-rending melody.
The gentlemen had always saved them a dinar or two in the hope that the musicians, with their fiddles, basses and accordions, would accompany them along the dewy streets on their way home. The gypsies, who all knew who lived where, would withdraw at just the right moment, so as not to wake the wives and children of these drunk and strangely melancholy men who had been up all night playing cards.
József Sárdy, secretary of the Office of the Special Military Tribunal, stepped through the swinging doors and surveyed his army. At Laci’s warning, the men had strapped on their belts as best they could and pushed their glasses to the end of the counter, but they were unable to hide their tipsy and demoralized state. Their condition, indeed, was not unlike that of the coffee house itself. Overturned chairs were scattered about the room, a few on the tables where they’d been for days; the curtains were perforated with cigarette holes, while the floor was strewn with old newspapers, on which the soldiers would wipe their boots. Only the chandeliers, which hung high overhead, still testified to the evenings when fine gentlemen used to sit beneath them.
A bit of yellowish light, penetrating the leafy chestnuts in the courtyard, was now caught in the dusty globes of glass beneath the ceiling and painted a rainbow across the walls. Perhaps it was merely a play of light, which might possibly be interpreted as a sign that the eye looking down on them was also present, or perhaps it was some unfathomable irony, even mockery of everything happening here. But its true importance, or more specifically, its meaning, was at that moment lost on József Sárdy, secretary of the Office of the Special Military Tribunal, who in fact had not understood anything for a long time.
‘You’re exactly the same as those tarts, those damn whores!’ he swore at the men. ‘I knew this would end up as one big whorehouse. The world is sinking in black mud and all you do is wait for something to happen. Well, let me tell you, it won’t be long before you’re pissing blood, and not from Laci’s booze either. But first the Reds will stuff our guts with maize, and then you worthless swine will see how the godless pray!’
József Sárdy, secretary of the Office of the Special Military Tribunal, didn’t wait for an answer – he knew that no one here would dare say a thing to him. So now his words just bounced off the crumbling walls. In the only remaining hotel far and wide, nothing was heard but the trickle of the liquor Laci was pouring from a wicker bottle into the shot glasses. But before the last drop had fallen, there again came the sound from upstairs of a woman shouting.
‘You bastard, you goddamn good-for-nothing!’ Sugar Neni was screaming – that’s what everybody called her. She was the main woman here. Before the war, there were almost always seven ladies upstairs, who regularly, every evening, would sit in front of the doors of three rooms, if they weren’t entertaining gentlemen in the casino or coffee house. They normally sat at the same table with the fiddlers, who didn’t always consider this an honour. Now, when very few men had the courage to enter this soldiers’ lair, and those who did were usually smugglers, drunks or freethinkers of dubious provenance, these ladies, too, were left without company or business. Only three still slept upstairs: Sugar Neni and two orphans, who had stayed on simply because they had nowhere else to go. If they went somewhere in town, they were sure to be torn apart by the half-starved dogs of the silent, virtuous townsfolk. People here still believed that the evil that had befallen them in these terrible years was spawned from moral indecency – from indecency in general. Indeed, one had only to look down the street or, perhaps, step into one of those once respectable houses, to be firmly convinced of this. Not even fine ladies and gentlemen were what they once were. No one could hide the black crescents beneath their fingernails or the yellowed collars on their once-starched shirts. But what most struck the eye was the mud, which could be seen everywhere, as if the earth had been soiling itself these past few years.
‘I’m gonna kill ya! I’m gonna shoot ya right now!’ Sugar Neni shouted from the top of the stairs. And now the soldiers were truly alarmed, as if a woman’s words were the only thing able to bring them to their senses, at least for a moment. And then she was downstairs, barefoot and wearing only a slip, which hung off her bony, famished body like the white flag of a vanquished army. In her hands she held, not without difficulty, an officer’s light pistol pressed against her face. The rouge on her cheeks, which had been made from paprika, was dissolving in her cold tears. Her hair was damp and matted in strands, which fell behind her ears, of which the right one was missing its earring.
József Sárdy, secretary of the Office of the Special Military Tribunal, before making any other move, lowered his left hand to his belt and felt for his weapon. He knew beyond a doubt that the firearm was his; he would have recognized it in the dark, so often had he polished, displayed and of course used it. Now, as he stood for the first time on the other side of its short, thin barrel, the pistol had never seemed more beautiful to him. Although from this same distance, just two or three steps, he had killed at least a dozen people with that gun, he was not the least bit afraid. He was gazing at the pistol, but the woman, whose entire body was struggling to support its invisible weight, a weight multiplied by despair, did not warrant even a glance from him.
‘Forget it, Nenika, just forget it. You can see how easily something might happen,’ the hotelier Laci tried to calm her; he was still holding the wicker bottle and a full glass of spirits. But his soothing words only strengthened her determination to do something she had never believed herself capable of doing. All her life she’d been swallowing insults, hiding invisible wounds inflicted by strangers who pointed their fingers at her and gawked behind her back. No one suspected that even she sometimes felt pain. Laci, perhaps, was the only one who had ever heard her cry, but he, too, eventually had to accept that it was all part of the job. There would be new guests arriving the next day; the broken pieces had to be picked up and pitchers refilled, and if you did it all in a friendly, obliging way, with that unmistakeable hotelier’s smile, so much the better for business. Once you master the ethics of the profession and abide by its principles, not even bruises hurt so much. It never really made sense to him, but he had unwittingly learned this from the Jews, of whom there had once been many here. In their shops and pubs, and even among the regular guests at his hotel, there had been those he took as a yardstick. Always precise, always obliging, always unyielding. And, especially when it came to business, slow to take offence. Money knows no feelings, although it always arouses them, feelings of every sort – Laci took this lesson to heart. Abide by this rule and you’ll be all right, he had often whispered to the women, to apprentices and even to himself, whenever he found it difficult to accommodate the drunks or the whims of gentlemen who were never in any hurry to leave.
But now, he realized, wasn’t the time to bring up his simple if outdated ethics. He knew he should do something, but he didn’t have the strength.
8
The chicken eye hanging in the sky was gazing fixedly at the varaš. It was sharp and shiny, like some unknown celestial phenomenon. One felt its presence, its mysterious pull and power, its ability to suck up anything caught in its gaze.
Franz Schwartz, former shopkeeper and camp prisoner now returning home, was walking down Main Street in the shade of the mighty plane trees. After that weary company of men had gone their separate ways, he