he was terrified, convinced that it was him they were looking for, his anxiety soon subsided: the two people, he was now sure, were a woman and a man, who were walking on their own path with their thoughts somewhere else. They were driven, he felt, by something that had nothing to do with him or the world, which was still enveloped in darkness.
By the time they hurried past, even though they were very close, he was completely calm, as if it was an earlier time, when people would pass each other on this well-tended path with pure thoughts, concerned only for business and the welfare of their families. In their footsteps, too, there had been no greed, fear or arrogance, but only concern, focus and full concentration on life. In the step and bearing of these men in simple black suits and the obligatory head covering, usually a hat, who walked on the gravel without leaving marks or gaps, even if they were shuffling along in light shoes and the sound could be heard as far as the street, there was something that made one think of chosenness, consecration or simply total devotion. Here, in this small Pannonian varaš, in the middle of nowhere, far from everything, people would ask themselves: devotion to what – to God or business?
A bell chimed midnight – it was the same small bell in the Lutheran church that had long ago imprinted itself on his body. Whenever it chimed, he would glance at his tiny pocket watch and reset it. The clock on this church had always been considered precise. The local elite set their watches by it. Labourers and small tradesmen worked to its rhythm, even if the great majority of them were Catholics and, one might say, adhered to a different reckoning of time. Nonetheless, everyone agreed that the somewhat newer and more modern German mechanism installed in the Lutheran clock was trustworthy. The Protestant ethic, in its shopkeeperly and tradesmanlike manner, as expressed particularly in the qualities of industriousness and precision, had spread unconsciously and persistently to the life of the local middle class. It was visible in the way you comported yourself and the people with whom you played cards or chess. The vocabulary of humility, absolution and even piety, as taught by the Catholics, had been pushed to the margins, far removed from coffee-house conversations and expelled from the hearts of the ladies of town. All the high-flown rhetoric that had captured the souls of intellectuals, small industrialists, tradesmen and the eternally overlooked artists had now become the only possible politics. With its precision, mechanical consistency and inhuman persistence, that dubious, mendacious spirit known as modern times had possessed the minds of these poor, foolish people.
Then, a single swing, a single stroke later, the bell rang out in the Catholic church, too. The difference, of course, was insignificant, negligible in fact, but for the town, which had been half asleep for decades, here amid the endless fields, forgotten by politics and, for many, by God himself, that difference was suddenly important, even fateful.
But maybe midnight had not struck, maybe the clocks had not even moved since they had been deported, exiled from a world that seemed ever less real to him. It could all be a dream, a spell, sorcery performed by old witches and wizards with hands forged from mud. He had heard it said that if you had a heart made of ashes you could trick people, persuade them that the world was a desolate land of pain and suffering, where only evil prospered.
For as it is written: earth to earth, ashes to ashes. And now, for the first time he asked himself: Would the sorcery ever end? Was the moment of awakening at hand?
He pondered these things as he lay there alone and abandoned, with that thought which he would never be able to express.
11
He saw him when he stepped into the light. He was wearing a big white shirt, loose over unbuttoned trousers, and clutched a pair of high boots in his left hand, and an overcoat of soft leather hung from his shoulders.
Moist breezes, dissolving in the milky morning, settled in the courtyard. In the distance one could hear dogs barking and the neighing of weary horses, as if the animals were tugging at heavy chains. At the first muffled bang, the man sat down on the doorstep and hastily started putting himself in order. He pulled his narrow boots on over his trousers, and knocked his heels a few times firmly against the ground. Although there was no echo, only that muffled bang from a rifle still hanging in the air, this pounding of human feet conveyed a certain resolve, maybe even vengeance, which was impossible for him to conceal. It was then that the sole person observing him noticed something else the man could not conceal, not from anyone – the entirely human, congenital deformity of his body. Namely, he was a hunchback, which Franz Schwartz noticed now as the man tried to straighten up. Under the long, leather overcoat, which was clearly too big for him, his condition was all the more evident. The man leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette. He took quick drags and puffed out thin clouds of smoke. He was enjoying this cigarette as if it was his last.
Even before he dropped the cigarette in the mud and crushed it beneath his heel, he rapped nervously on the window, but no one responded.
He’s waiting for her and they don’t have much time, Franz Schwartz said to himself. Only now did he recall the two people who had spent the night on the other side of the wall. He had nearly forgotten that he wasn’t the only guest at Ascher’s house. In his groggy, aching head, still suspended somewhere between sky and earth as if it was not attached to his battered body, fear was the only thing nagging him now. He knew he had to find a hiding place as soon as possible, even before that peculiar couple left the house – whether they had come here out of a purely human passion or carried within themselves some entirely different message, he didn’t know. They may have seemed quite innocent last night (as much as he could judge, of course), but now everything had changed.
‘Give me my gun! I’m going!’ the man said sharply, again rapping nervously on the windows.
‘So go!’ he heard a voice say firmly. ‘And take your pistol, I’m not keeping it from you.’
‘Damn whore, I’ll teach you to coddle guns,’ the man replied and ran back inside. Franz Schwartz now seized his chance and with great difficulty dragged himself away from the building. He was already expecting the man to come around the corner and discover him when his eyes fell on a summer house standing some ten yards away.
In better days it had always been freshly whitewashed. It stood in the shade of a huge plane tree, one of those that had been planted when they were putting in the trees along Main Street, by which he had arrived here. It was in the summer house – which in winter was glazed and filled with plants that spent the cold months there, while in summer people would sit in it late into the night by the light of a paraffin lamp – it was here, then, in this pavilion where Franz Schwartz now sought shelter, that the elder Ascher would usually bring his most demanding or most valued customers, usually bankers and wholesalers, as well as those who owed him money, and it was here, at the same round table beneath which he was now lying, that they would negotiate a settlement on the debt or arrange some big Sóbota business deal. It all came back to him clearly once he had hidden himself again. Now he was nothing but ears, listening to every movement or possible word that might tell him if he should be afraid of those two or if he could trust them – maybe they could even get him back to Rakičan, where Šamuel Ascher still lay, the man in whose house all of this was happening. They were obviously very much at home here: they had known exactly where the path was in the dark and when he arrived there had been a light burning faintly in the windows, which they, most likely, had left on – but he couldn’t remember them from anywhere, and he knew almost everyone who used to come here, since he, too, had been a regular visitor. So those two people, and maybe there were more inside, must have come later, after all the Jews had been deported from town.
The house had been empty; it stood on a corner of the town’s main intersection, opposite the only hotel in which the last Hungarian soldiers were now struggling on, held together by nothing but the mad persistence of József Sárdy, secretary of the Office of the Special Military Tribunal. Precisely because it was so visible, and was Jewish, too (as people said here), which meant that the owners were certainly dead, their bodies in a shallow grave somewhere in the depths of the Pannonian plain, in Hungary or Poland, maybe where no living person would ever find them again – for precisely these reasons, this house was the perfect place for people to visit from time to time, or even to secretly occupy; so concluded the man who was shivering on a damp floor littered with leaves and rubbish in a ramshackle summer house.