Across the street, at the filthy, rundown Hotel Dobray, the red curtain was still hanging out of the window. In the morning calm, when there was no one yet to be seen and only shadows were trailing down the soft, well-soaked streets, the curtain looked like a banner for the dead which some drunks must have dropped before collapsing in pools of booze. The soldiers, who were lying intoxicated on chairs and tables, did not actually know any more to whose army they belonged. They were now pretending to defend the last remaining fort in a senseless world, in a town that had been isolated all these years, playing at its own war, on land that belonged to nobody knew who. For decades, governments and armies had come and gone in turn, each with its own law in its own language, which sought to convince people that it alone was the true and proper law. So it was that in this little varaš people spoke and wrote for a long time in Hungarian, and then, again, in Prekmurian, which in a way was a mixture of all these languages. Many swore oaths in German, Serbian and even Czech; nor should one forget that Romany was spoken here, and Hebrew, of course, and in the year before the war many had started writing in Slovene, which was said to be the only proper language for everyone, on either side of the Mura.
Now, for a second time, war had rocked this marvellous chicken coop, where wild and domestic fowl alike crowded beneath the same rickety, leaky roof. And it was in this squalid, crappy hen’s nest, as József Sárdy, secretary of the Office of the Special Military Tribunal, had recently taken to saying, that they were all going to croak. That same secretary, left without the army and tribunal in whose name he made decisions, now realized that he would have to take things into his own hands. He had introduced a few drastic measures the previous afternoon and had been refining them throughout the long night.
‘Everyone to arms!’ he ordered, now that the pointless gunfire with the woman had somehow ended. At the thought of his woman, that devoted creature Sugar Neni, who alone had truly remained by their side in this senseless war, he felt, perhaps for the only time, real and genuine pain. Not even she is completely mine, it dawned on him. Nothing in this world is mine. Just like these soldiers and this crappy town, which no one gives a damn about and never did, this woman, too, was not his. Nothing is mine. He had never been able to admit that apart from that pompous title – Secretary of the Office of the Special Military Tribunal – nothing was actually his. It was only when he called those debauched and drunken soldiers to arms, which they had probably forgotten how to use, and with his own hands herded each of them to an open window, to gaze out on the empty streets, which were now being washed in a slow rain – only then did he feel that it would have been better, would have been only right, if the woman had shot him, or at least wounded him. That would have been his only actual bleeding wound, something that might outweigh all the senseless waiting he was doing in this chicken coop. But the shot from his little gun had gone into a wall somewhere.
And everyone whose head I’ve ever blown off will go on staring at me from that other world – a world he couldn’t name even though he was seeing it more and more often. It had to exist somewhere, for he heard all those dead men calling to him, reminding him, but mainly they were gawping at him with their pale, vacant eyes.
13
The army of József Sárdy, secretary of the Office of the Special Military Tribunal, assumed their positions one last time – which they all very well knew. Private Kolosváry, however, a man who had somehow managed to preserve his common sense and, more importantly, a particle of clear-headedness, or it might have been the voice of a conscience not utterly ruined by Laci’s booze, that palinka – in any case, the soldier now felt a serious urge to quit, to step away and simply lay down his weapon; he was almost ready to desert, even at the price of a bullet in the head from the very pistol his commanding officer had been brooding over a little while earlier.
Kolosváry was crouching by the wall, beneath the last of the long row of tall, wide-open windows in the coffee house. From here the view looked out on a clear expanse, in which Main Square stood encircled by a broad, muddy cartway. To the right, a row of abandoned Jewish shops abutted the sodden thoroughfare, and somewhere in the middle, set back from the road, the steeple of the Lutheran church was jutting into the sky; a little further on, Main Street turned into Lendava Road. This, presumably, was the direction from which the thing they all feared would come.
More and more rumours, intimations, conjectures and prophecies were circulating, as well as visions and dreams, from both the sick and the seemingly well, which rivalled each other in the horror, detail and strength of their description of what was coming from far away, from the deepest, darkest plains, where the sun only rarely shone. Fear was always foremost in these images – fear of the devil, godlessness, chaos, debauchery, unbridled lust, alcohol, looting, the burning of money and the rejection of every sort of law, whether earthly or heavenly.
The sleepy and still intoxicated soldiers set their rifles on the windowsills and waited half-dozing with flushed faces. Their watery gazes were lost in the distance. The only thing constantly before their eyes were the tall chestnuts in the hotel’s garden, and it was these they held in their crosshairs. The mighty, silent trees had just begun to put forth leaves, and later, towards evening, when the soldiers would be hungry and thirsty, when their hearts would yearn for some pungent liquid to rinse out their smoky lungs, that is, even before the sun had set on the endless plain, they would start to believe they could hear the leaves growing.
‘Shoot at anyone who approaches the garden. Don’t let them step into the shadow of those chestnuts,’ József Sárdy concluded his orders as he backed away towards the swinging doors that led upstairs. As his sweaty palm was feeling behind him for the way out, he cast a glance one more time over the lair he was hastily abandoning. In the months he had lived here, he had somehow grown fond of it all, though he would never admit it. Now, as he gazed on the wreckage both outside and within, he was almost sad. He remembered the first day he entered this damned hotel, as he had recently been calling it.
It had been just a few days after Horthy’s capitulation and the seizure of power in Budapest by the Hungarian fascists. The new government of Ferenc Szálasi and his Arrow Cross Party were calling openly for continuing the war alongside the German occupiers, mainly out of fear of the Red Army, which was surging from the east like an unstoppable flood, scattering, destroying and obliterating whatever its terrible waters touched. Everyone knew that this force, which in the stories people were telling was endowed with an almost supernatural power, needed merely a favourable wind before it ploughed across the plain and engulfed the entire wounded Reich, Hungary with it. In March 1944, the only question was the price they would pay to let the Russians flay them – such were the thoughts in those days of the young intern at the military tribunal in Budapest. After the coup and the capitulation, when the home-grown fascists came to power and Hungary was annexed to the Reich, the intern deemed it wise to accept a promotion and leave Budapest, to go somewhere far away, to a province he had never heard of, to a town he could barely find on the map. This pocket of land between the Mura and Raba rivers, at the far edge of his country, seemed a remote and safe enough place to hide and await a possible turnaround – were that, by some strange divine plan, ever to happen. But he did not believe in such a plan, even if he thought the idea itself rather credible – for why would God allow the communists, the sworn enemies of Christ, to destroy them? This, of course, was nothing but a supposition that people were deliberating in the coffee houses of Budapest, as they dreamed of a great Pannonian homeland in which horses grazed and poets wrote great Hungarian poetry, worthy of the former monarchy.
14
That boundless silence and space, where sky and earth bleed into each other and an invisible line makes an arc in the distance, like the momentary gleam of a border no one has yet drawn but which the dead are smuggling themselves across – it was there that something that morning shifted. It was as if an old warship, returning from its final battle, was trapped in a calm. The masts were broken and the tattered sails, hanging over the sides of the weary ship, were soaking in the motionless sea, which was washing the blood off the rotting ropes. The ship’s men, those shattered, sleepy mariners, had been propped motionless in their cramped positions for what seemed an eternity, staring vacantly through their gunports at that invisible border thickening in their desperate hearts. Overhead, high above everything, hung the motionless sun, which spilled out across a childishly clear and innocent