Читать книгу Billiards at the Hotel Dobray - Dusan Sarotar - Страница 4

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If anywhere there is an eye that is bigger than life, then its gaze must be able to embrace the entire universe, all visible and invisible worlds, both good and evil at once; people say that a person can see the whole, can glimpse the truth compressed in a single second, only at the moment of crossing between life and death. But the question remains: are all these crossings, these final seconds, also captured in the gaze of that great eye? In other words, does it only see them or does it also remember them? Does the eye ever shut and recall?

A LULLABY

A dull, hollow sky stretched down to the squat houses, which were wheezing shallow breaths into the damp, stifling air. These strange, colourless exhalations, rising from the dead earth and errant mists, had settled in front of the town – the varaš – like a mighty ghost from the past which not even children believed in any more. The secret that once lingered in these parts had again had to flee. It could be felt in the strange murmuring that hovered above the open plain. Now, at the hour of its departure, a sticky emptiness was opening. Somewhere deep down only oil stains and pillars of rock salt remained. Hidden in dense fog, which no wind would disperse for a long time, lay the last evidence that life could be any different.

The shine had faded long ago from the silver coffee spoons, and the determined clack of chessmen on chessboards, once intermingled with fervent conversations, had fallen silent. In the background of this genteel and seemingly well-mannered play of words and wit, the town lived its other, secret life. One sensed it as a devious, dire, even incurable disease that was slowing eating away at the idyllic façade. Perhaps it was only the spirit of the age, about which there had been so much discussion, but everyone agreed that the golden years they had shared were passing, the days when on the street, in coffee houses or at the cinema, the people of this small world, hidden from the world outside, would meet and greet each other as in a big communal garden.

Sadness, inexplicable melancholy and staring at dark landscape paintings and faded photographs, long solitary daydreaming and, especially, sinking into silence – these were all signs of the chronic disease that had been gaining power over the varaš.

At this hour, in late March, in the year 1945, all that could be heard from the cellar bars and illicit taprooms was an incomprehensible mix of half-drunken tongues struggling to keep up with the tuneless wail of violins and cracked drums. Now the only things in tune, playing with manful resolution, were the army bugles, which were summoning soldiers to the final march.

That night the story of good men and women could barely stand up to the devious wind dispassionately erasing the words on the faded monuments of the law. This mysterious force was stronger than the storms and deeper than the floods that were once talked about here. It came as a vague feeling, or a long, harrowing dream, which burrowed into people’s souls even before they fell asleep or drank themselves into a stupor.

All of this was pressing down from above on this forgotten, sleepy town, tired of contrived splendour and barren grandeur, too tired perhaps even to die, as hope had died – hope in the coming of the one who will judge by the letter of the law.

The wooden roller blinds on the tall windows of the middle-class houses and shops on Horthy Street were tightly shut; somewhere deep behind these windows, beneath the cool ceilings of drawing rooms, in sitting rooms that looked out on gardens still gripped by icy dew, words were few, wrenched out like a hacking cough for which no medicine existed.

‘Brandy taken with honey and bed rest – that’s the only thing that helps,’ people said on the street. But for timidity and especially the fear that comes from a chronic lack of will, there was no effective medicine. So the silence and the rare, awkward word uttered behind thick walls sank ever deeper into memories of earlier, better days. What was growing ever louder, and was, so to speak, already at the gates of this unwalled, sleepy varaš, which shook with every Pannonian breeze, only a very few saw in their sleep. It was something wild and destructive, yet at the same time liberating, like a strong home remedy for a bloody cough, which in large doses causes intoxication, madness and often even death.

The small windows, too, in the working-class and semi-farming houses, which stood in regular rows abutting long, muddy streets, were draped in thick, oft-mended curtains, which almost nobody took down, even during the day. In these low, dark little rooms, people spent entire days just sitting and waiting, the life slowly draining from their pale faces and watery eyes. For the past four years, the invisible river of time had been flowing through them, and was filled with all the hatred and despair its eddying current had picked up and carried from somewhere far away. In this peaceful, level terrain, where the river became more sluggish, where it almost came to a stop, it was slowly unloading this unbearable burden.

All of this lay on the souls of the silent, patient people who in this remote and hidden world were obediently sitting and waiting. In their humility and devotion they might well have been chosen by God himself. Devotedly they bore the senselessness of a world they knew only by hearsay, and did so for no other reason than to keep the world from collapsing on the muddy plain and falling forever into the universal abyss.

Thus had the town stood long years in isolation, gazing inwards and almost forgotten – by God, by grand politics and even by the slaughters of war. But now, as the war was approaching its denouement, an evil eye had suddenly started exchanging glances with this backwater world.

The end of the war was on the doorstep; one sensed it in the sordid peace in which the townspeople were so soundly asleep.

But every so often, from somewhere far away, from beyond the heights of Srebrni Breg, where the view opened onto the endless, rolling plain, across Hungary, Poland and all the way to the Baltic Sea, came the sound of muffled explosions.

It was not stars that were reflected on the Pannonian sea, but artillery fire. On a night such as the one that day in March, a night too dark for early spring and much too dark for the first red spring, of which there were already whispers, one might from a high balcony have seen the illuminated star of the Kremlin. But there were no high balconies here, and no one had climbed a church tower in a very long time, so everyone relied solely on rumours, half-truths, hopes and, especially, on fortune tellers, who from behind every corner were gazing into the future.

The muffled explosions were heard, too, by the man walking beside a road lined with poplars, which all these years had kept growing into the sky as though indifferent to the burgeoning madness in people’s heads, but to him the sounds were merely the sighs of the people of Sóbota, who were still falling out of bed in their sleep, as children do the first night they sleep alone.

The man, hunched over as he trudged along the ditch beneath the poplars, next to the road from Rakičan to Sóbota, only now realized, when he heard in the distance the almost simultaneous chiming of the Catholic and Lutheran bells, that he had nearly reached his goal.

‘That’s Sóbota,’ he murmured through cracked lips. His dry, ashen face, concealed by the rumpled, broad brim of his black hat, bore no signs of either joy or despair. His deep eyes, sunken in his bony skull, held a gaze that nothing could ever again excite. It was as if their light, coming from some inscrutable interior, had seen all the horror and beauty of this world. Now those eyes were staring, as if at rest, at the shape of the dreaming varaš, somewhere beyond the real world.

He leaned against a poplar, which was already sprouting its first green leaves on its long, thin branches. He hugged the tree to keep from keeling over. He was afraid of collapsing and falling asleep like Šamuel Ascher, his travelling companion, whose strength had given out in the park in Rakičan. This must have been only a little way back, no more than a hundred yards or so, but how much time, how many years had passed since then – this was impossible

to know.

The slender, upright trees had kept rising from the earth even when no one was watching. The poplars would still be growing by the side of the road even when there was no one left to step into their lengthy shadows. Those endless, dark bands, which touched the very edge of the limitless plain, might one day be the only things reaching across the horizon.

Wounded and weary from travelling, the figure stood benumbed in the middle of the plain, only an arrow’s shot from the town, over which the March sky was already turning red. He waited in vain for the gates of some mighty wooden tower to open. The poplars grew silently into the endless sky.

The dew on the old gravestones was sparkling in the morning sun. Lighter than fog and transparent as ether, the air was hung with shadows, which seemed to have just now separated from the names that remained in the gold Hebrew inscriptions. There were not many who could still read them, and even fewer who knew the law, but that morning it was as if the forgotten holy days had returned.

For it was said: Honour the holy days and you will see tomorrow as if it were today.

The sky above the Jewish cemetery had brightened. One felt the presence of souls hovering over the consecrated ground. It was still early; the town, on the other side of the railway tracks, was only now waking up, achingly, from its long doze.

In the shuffle of heavy footsteps on white gravel and the soft rustling of the poplars, the only other audible sound came from the first birds flying in small flocks across the sky. But whenever the footsteps stopped for a moment, as if the man had forgotten himself and was gazing at the faded names on the stone pillars, something else could be heard, as well. Something that was not the murmur of migratory birds beneath the blue sky or the clacking of the stiff joints of those who had just woken up. Perhaps it was a voice that had never yet been heard, although it was written that one day it would speak.

Whatever it was, Franz Schwartz heard something that morning that had long lain dormant inside him.

The light hung above the plain. The dew was slowly evaporating. The gravestones in the old cemetery were getting paler, as the last drops of moisture trickled down the black obelisks and obscured the names and dates. Gleam and glisten were now lost in sharp brightness. Franz Schwartz, fugitive and newcomer returning to his lost home, flinched at the long, shrill blast of a whistle. The ground in the cemetery trembled. He would have stood there much longer if the train, wheezing its way to the nearby station, had not disturbed him. In the distance he saw the thick cloud of smoke. It rose above the Catholic church and covered the sun over Sóbota. The refugee in the long black overcoat, which had once belonged to a soldier from God knows which army, stepped again onto the dusty road. Here, he hoped, his journey was coming to an end.

But now, when he was practically in the town, he was seized by dread. He felt that he was only at the beginning. That everything he had carried inside him over the past year, as he wandered across this bleak and alien land, had vanished in the morning dew. Everything was different here, he realized at the next whistle blast from the old locomotive, which had laboriously drawn to a stop at the small railway station. Franz Schwartz stood for a moment on the tracks he had just crossed and gazed at the station.

In the distance, the locomotive was releasing its steam, and the exhausted engine and the station buildings were swallowed in a white cloud. The whistling and rumbling of the heavy machine were enough to drown out even the bells tolling from both churches. The noise and the thunder of the bells must surely have woken every last person. Time seemed to have stopped. For an instant everything around him was still: the birds hung motionless in the air, the grass did not stir, the blood froze in his veins. Franz Schwartz now saw far behind him. In deepest darkness, images began to move.

He was watching the ordinary, everyday order of the arrival and departure of the train from Goričko, which was depositing students with books slung over their shoulders, village gentry in their best suits with large briefcases, workers in patched trousers and women with big kerchiefs on their heads and enormous straw bags in their hands. Hidden in the bags were jars of curd cheese, eggs and the occasional chicken. All of it these wives, mothers and housemaids would sell to the wealthy ladies of the varaš in a few brief circuits round the town.

The black-market trade had expanded greatly over the past four years. Hunger and the disintegration of the old order, both brought about by the war, had taken their toll.

Surreptitiously, at the back door, elderly gentlemen and ladies were selling small items of great value on the black market: silver, artworks, jewellery, even family heirlooms. Anything whose lack would not outwardly or too obviously compromise the visible lustre and trappings of wealth was slowly disappearing from display cabinets and from under pillows. Nothing was left on the walls but dusty frames; dust was collecting, too, in the empty, artfully decorated chests of drawers, while family photographs now stood alone on mantelpieces. Many of those who had once proudly posed in front of some respected photographer’s camera lens were by now long gone. Letters arrived only rarely, or a telegraph saying that the person was missing or in prison or dead.

This forbidden exchange, this black-market commerce – which was nothing but one great sadness, a struggle for sheer survival – best portrayed the reality here. Not death, terror, incitement to violence, the recruits or the quickly suppressed Partisan resistance, but buying and selling, the clandestine barter with reputation, power and envy – that was the great local war.

It must have been nearly a year ago at this same railway station that he last saw his wife and son. They were being herded with the others by Germans in pressed uniforms and polished boots, while Hungarians in hunting jackets trotted subserviently alongside them. The train from Goričko had been whistling and wheezing in the same lazy voice it did now. As soon as the Hungarians, with exaggerated, feigned fury, had unloaded everyone from the cold, sooty carriages, the Germans very meticulously divided them up. The men were lined against the wall of the station, while the women and children were packed into Černjavič’s pub, which stood on the platform. The bar was shut down for an hour. The pub’s few patrons – mainly labourers, who were normally found here first thing in the morning nursing a cider or brandy, and travellers without luggage – were banished to the garden, from where they were forced to watch the scene at the station.

It was the very same blast of a steam whistle, in this half-deserted and forgotten station, or alomaš, as people called it, that blared forth that April day in 1944 and so deadened all their bodies that they more or less automatically, almost mechanically and with no real expression on their faces, moved towards the platform; their eyes, swollen and white, would never close again but would only stare into an emptiness filled with whistling, shouting, wailing, weeping and sobbing – they would, in other words, be guided only by sounds and voices, which became unbearably louder and louder until all that remained, above the world and in their memories, was an attenuated, monotonous, almost supernatural soundscape, filled with smoke escaping from the boiler of a superheated locomotive.

Franz Schwartz again saw them, now after long years, as he gazed at the quiet, nearly forgotten station, with only poplars beside it looking down from above and, hovering just over their pointed crowns, white cumulous clouds; he saw them, people holding tight to their sleepy children, suitcases and hastily wrapped packages, from which protruded silk-embroidered tablecloths, big down-filled pillows, fur collars and books, with oils on canvas cut from expensive frames hanging from open handbags like long loaves of fresh bread.

No one was speaking, everything was unfolding so quickly, people showing a certain inborn submissiveness and attention, which is to be expected of those who have been taught that order must always be observed. They would, of course, complain later, when they had a chance to speak to the men in charge, the highest authorities, who sit in quiet offices – no, no, now isn’t the time, and anyway, what’s the point of talking to these people whose uniforms aren’t even of the proper rank; they look like mere workmen, carrying out explicit orders from above; you won’t get anywhere with them, they’re just doing their job. Of course, everything is documented, but the paperwork seems all right, in order, signed and stamped; there must have been a mistake, a big mistake, which these people certainly can’t understand, let alone resolve. Now they just had to be patient, to make sure nothing in their precious luggage went missing, and they had to watch the children, who were getting restless and curious – they don’t know what’s happening either, but somehow it will all work out in the end.

Franz Schwartz’s words had been lost forever in the unbearable thunder and groan of the old train. Even that lazy, temperamental machine must have felt something that morning. People departed without saying goodbye. They were swallowed by the fog and the steam.

The wind borne by the plain from the east was dispersing the smoke from the station and distributing it noisily among the houses. It was then that whatever hope Franz Schwartz still carried inside him collapsed. He knew that Ellsie and Izak would never again appear out of the fog. Here, for a long time to come, people would still be getting on and off trains, embracing each other and saying their farewells, but he would always be waiting. He alone would be walking across the tracks and watching for the train that would one day take him away, too.

As the train pulled out of the station he thought of Šamuel Ascher. The regular pounding of its wheels and the wheezing of the tired engine were coming closer and closer. The smoke that rose from the superheated boiler was now almost white as it trailed directly above the tops of the rickety carriages. The locomotive was accelerating.

Franz Schwartz continued to gaze at the monster, which was blowing its whistle louder and louder, since by now the driver had certainly seen him. And he, for his part, saw the fireman, whose black hand was gripping a small red flag and waving it at him. From the station to the cemetery, where the railway crossed the road, was less than two hundred yards, not far but still enough distance for the train to be approaching him at a hurtling speed.

Mainly, however, that minute was time enough for a decision. For a step that a short while before had seemed impossible. In that piercing whistle, which went right through his body, Franz Schwartz – shopkeeper, former proprietor of a general store, gentleman and, especially, husband – decided to take this step.

But he had promised Šamuel Ascher, who was lying somewhere in Rakičan Park, that he would get him home.

The train blew its whistle; hot, dense steam shrouded the crossing and, mixed with the dust of the road, rose into the sky. The crosses in the town cemetery and the black gravestones in the Jewish cemetery, forlorn beside the tracks, again trembled. The whistle was heard throughout the varaš, which was lounging with seeming indifference in the middle of the endless plain. It was as if a ram’s horn had sounded, to awaken at last the souls of this sleepy town.

The locomotive, with its wooden carriages jumping along the tracks like crates of potatoes, was already in the middle of farmland. The terrified recruits in the first two carriages crowded around the open windows. Through the smoke and the soot, with tears in their eyes, they were looking back towards the station, as it receded to an invisible dot. In the last car, drunken officers and their adjutants, in German and Hungarian uniforms, were sitting with rifles in their hands. For several days now their generals, bewildered and lost, had been shuffling them around, carting them back and forth across the plain. They were all making plans in their hearts to flee this godforsaken place. They suspected that the train wouldn’t get very far. Many of them would soon be sent back to the station on foot, the ones who already carried death inside them, only they did not know this. They were all just waiting for the moment when this hapless train would approach the Mura River. The Germans, who had begun to feel that time was running out, were desperate to cross it. The mighty wind that was driving them from the east like dry leaves would soon be here. For the others, it was by now clear that they would do better to stay. If the end was coming, it was best to wait for it here. The soldiers were counting on the train slowing down before it reached the garrisoned bridge; at that moment they would all leap through the open doors and take off in all directions across the fields. They would hide in the dead pools of the river and wait for night to come, wait even, perhaps, for the war to end. It was only the Germans who still shot at deserters, but maybe before the train reached the bridge they would be drunk on the liquor the recruits were offering them. These days nobody knew for sure who you had to be afraid of or who you had to shoot.

It was being said more and more out loud, even among ordinary soldiers, that the thunder and occasional explosions, originating somewhere in distant Russia, were getting closer and closer. Russian bullets could now reach even here. Gunfire was being heard in the Goričko forests, the Raba valley and the villages on the plain, and there had been a succession of small diversions as well, and the anxiety of the Arrow Crossists and local administrators was escalating. Partisans, it was said, had again infiltrated the region, although no one had yet seen them. But they knew they were dangerous. After all, they had ties with the Reds, who were advancing across the steppes.

A month ago, in the middle of February, Budapest had fallen. One of the Hungarian privates, a boy barely out of adolescence who was carrying a fiddle in his duffel bag, was already good and drunk, even at that early hour. He wasn’t used to the strong liquor, in which he had been drowning his fear and comforting his soul. They had been drinking it for several days on end. He stood up from the wooden bench and cried out that his Budapest had turned red. The snow, which had come down in great heaps in February and covered Buda and Pest in white – he explained, gasping for breath – was now, after the invasion of the Red Army, red with blood. Blood was falling from the sky. Saying this, he took another long draught of the liquor and then spat on the floor.

‘Play for us, István, play something,’ his mates started shouting. The boy pulled the fiddle out of the duffel bag and, with full concentration, as if instantly sobering up, he began to play. All of them – the Sóbota recruits, the Hungarian soldiers, the train driver, the fireman – everyone knew this sad Hungarian melody. It spilled from the creaking carriages into the dewy morning, somewhere between Sóbota and Beltinci.

They sang like a chorus of condemned men whose necks had just been sliced through. The train whistled on towards Beltinci station, where a new contingent of frightened boys, with unshaven cheeks and forcibly shaven heads, were waiting.

‘So where are we supposed to put them?’ the train driver yelled, with a cigarette pressed between his lips and his hand on the brake. The song and the plaintive wail of the fiddle had by now reached the approaching station. But the sound was blurred and no one could say if this was a song of despair, sadness or joy.

At the last possible moment, Franz Schwartz stepped across the tracks. The smoke and dust had still not settled by the time the train was approaching Beltinci. Then a shot rang out. Followed by a short burst of shooting. The sudden gunfire, which pierced the deafness of the morning, could be felt all the way to the town. Franz Schwartz heard it, too, as he ran towards the Catholic church and then, gasping for breath, turned at the intersection, right next to Bajlec’s house, into Church Street. He stopped for a moment opposite the Naday house, where some barrels of wine were being unloaded from a cart. That’s when the echo of a second burst of gunfire reached Sóbota. The Hungarian private lay dead on the floor of the carriage, his liquor glass under his neck. The fiddle, surrounded by hobnailed boots, was still reverberating beneath the bench.

Although one of the Hitlerites yelled that they should chuck the fiddle out of the window and the fiddler with it, no one could bend down and reach it because of the crush in the carriage. For it was then that the hapless train stopped and the new herd of recruits pushed their way on.

The plain stretched in long, evenly spaced ribbons from the creaking locomotive to the horizon, and across these taut furrows, like a bow across strings, the Pannonian river slithered and weaved. The earth was ringing, groaning and in slow, muted, minor chords, receding into the universe.

Although it had been nearly a year – from the end of the previous April to late March 1945, when Franz Schwartz returned to the town – everything was the same as always. It was as if during those eleven months, when he was walking on the brink of hell, which he had previously heard only the most fervent, God-fearing Catholics talk about, nothing whatsoever had happened here. Now he could assure those virtuous, pious men and women that everything that had been preached to them out of books was true. The only thing he could not understand was why their priests would be spared all this misery. For he had seen things that perhaps would never be written in books.

The tall, two-storey houses of the local elite, with commercial spaces and workshops below and residential quarters above, were still standing peacefully in a row. Nothing had been either destroyed or renovated. The façades with their tall windows and half-drawn blinds looked down on the empty streets with a weary and rather absent, almost musing, gaze.

The boys who were wrestling with the heavy barrels, which were filled with the highly valued wines of Lendava and Filovci, took one look at the ghost and fled into the cool corridors of the Naday house, leaving the merchandise in the street.

The only change here, which the newcomer noticed at once, was the sign above the door, which said: Mura Valley Wine Merchants – Proprietors J. Benko, A. Faflik, L. Bac.

Franz Schwartz, proprietor of a general store, property owner and building materials wholesaler, remembered these respectable gentlemen very well. Clearly, they had done excellent business during the time he was gone. That came to him quickly, as if he had cracked open a door no one had used in a long time.

He also had no trouble recognizing the Cvetič textile factory, which looked especially dreary. From its yard you would always hear the shouts of the supervisors driving the women to work faster. Clearly, the sewing machines were not rumbling today, devouring miles of sharp thread.

He walked on. Brumen’s shop on the corner was also closed. He glanced down Court Street; it was completely empty. He hurried past the courthouse and stopped in the middle of the big, wide intersection. Large teams of horses could easily make turns here. To his left he saw the Bac Hotel, whose owner was the same gentleman mentioned on the earlier sign. Not a living soul was in sight. Even the wine barrels were still sitting abandoned in the street.

What day is it? he wondered.

Days, months, almost years – he had long ago stopped counting them. At first, the Jews who were together in the internment camp had tried at least to remember which days were Saturdays, but in the labour camps the Germans and Hungarians soon managed to erase all sense of time. During the day they were transported in dark cattle wagons from worksite to worksite, where at night they dug trenches and moats. Later, they were often abandoned to the mercy and cruelty of the Allied bombers dropping bombs left over from the raids on Budapest. Muddy and hungry, they would lie there sometimes for days on end. After each air raid, the trenches were like poorly dug graves that needed to be reopened again and again. They were suspended between sky and earth, their feet in the graves, their heads among the stars. Days and dates lost all meaning. Living corpses, repeatedly buried and exhumed, as if rising from the dead and lying down with the dead, they now observed only the phases of the moon. At night in the ditches, they would watch its waxing and waning. But the moon, too, was often obscured by clouds, smoke and mortal weariness.

In the end, it was time that remained, duration without rhythm. Time, like a long, liberating but also destructive silence after music. A silence that opens into the interior.

The cold, gaseous sphere hung motionless over the town. The houses, the plane trees and poplars that lined the streets, the bell towers, the man – all were left without shadow. The sharp, blinding light had painfully imprinted an image of the morning on the consciousness of Franz Schwartz. In a succession of short exposures, one after the other as if he was blinking his eyes, the pages of a large photo album were being turned inside him. He stood in the middle of the intersection, entirely alone. He looked down Horthy Street, the former Main Street, past the rows of tall plane trees, behind which stood coffee houses, a pharmacy and shops. His eye reached all the way to Main Square, where he could see the green of the chestnut trees in front of the Hotel Dobray. He felt he could see even further, past the compact row of Jewish shops, as people called them. He knew every one of them; how could he not? His inner eye reached all the way to Lendava Road, beyond the bend on the right. The Hartner house was still standing on the corner, next to Kirbisch’s pub, and on the other side of the road was Benko’s meat factory and, a little further on, the synagogue. He knew all these houses and their occupants, every last one of them, all the way to Benkič’s pub and the Ledava Bridge.

He had crossed that bridge countless times coming into town. In good weather he had liked riding into town on his new motorcycle, to show it off; Mr Steiner had ordered it for him from Germany. Most often, however, he had come here by train, the same train that was now somewhere in the middle of the fields, full of recruits and soldiers. For him, the train was also very convenient. His building materials business was located by the train stop in the village of Šalovci. With larger orders he had to deliver the materials to Sóbota himself, where he would then dine with the customer – maybe just goulash and coffee in one of the better pubs. It all depended on the transaction. He had suppliers and customers in both Croatia and Hungary; new business routes were also opening up for timber from Gottschee and even Italian stone. There had been a lot of construction in the region in the years before the war, especially in the town. But the villages, too, were not to be dismissed: many innkeepers knew how to attract travellers, who often enough passed through these parts headed to Szombathely, Lake Balaton and all the way to Budapest, or south to Lendava, Čakovec, and from there to Zagreb, and they made good money from it. Another route that had again been gaining importance was the one to Graz, Vienna and Bratislava; here, too, there had still been plentiful opportunities for honest trade. Modern architects, distinguished customers – it all required effort, seeking out new partnerships, and a great deal of resourcefulness. The times, to be sure, had been changing.

It was, in fact, over the Ledava Bridge that the light now came, as if it had found its way here along all the routes and on all the winds of this unhappy world. It was spilling over the streets and the houses, colouring and reviving memories. Everything was as if on a well-preserved postcard, which you keep safe even though you have no desire to look at it a second time. You guard the picture in memory of the one who mailed it to you out of love. But now he is long gone and you remain alone. The picture of the varaš, safely pressed between the covers of a thick book, is all you have left. The sender’s smile is lost forever, and now his handwriting, too, is fading.

The fiddle was still reverberating. The soul of the Hungarian private, whose body had been tossed into a dead pool somewhere before the Veržej Bridge, would float above the plain for a long time. 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.

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 was slowly going to hell, he could best be compared to the ladies upstairs lying devotedly 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.

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 had met no one else. They had disappeared in the narrow lanes, even as the sad music, too, which the musicians had left in their hearts, inaudibly dwindled away. The only thing growing was the chicken eye in the sky. No one could say if it was swelling from the warmth of the fortune teller’s hand, still cradling the coffee cup on the steps of the Hotel Dobray, or if something much greater, something fateful, was at work.

If she had not heard a woman’s desperate voice coming from inside the hotel, the fortune teller would have probably kept staring at the sky a long time, but as it was, she lowered her eyes for a moment and looked up the street towards Faflik’s coffee house, as if searching for new steps to move to with all her weird thoughts. That’s when she spotted the stooped shape in the long, rumpled officer’s overcoat, which appeared and then disappeared in the row of plane trees. The woman became agitated; from the rattle of the porcelain in her hands it was clear that this strong woman was overcome by fear. Unable to see the creature’s face, which was hidden beneath the brim of an overlarge hat, she thought the shadow was moving only in her head. Everything told her that this image meant misfortune; perhaps death itself had wandered into this godforsaken town. And now that it was here, it would stay here until it took what belonged to it.

The windows were slightly open in the hotel. The wind, which had been slowly rising and whirling up the dust on the road, had without a sound almost shut them. But one of the red scorched curtains had become trapped in the casements and was hanging out of the front of the building. That was the first thing Franz Schwartz noticed when he reached the large intersection in the middle of town. He was standing on the side of the street opposite the hotel, right next to Ascher’s shop. Now there was nobody on the hotel steps. The great chestnut trees, which concealed the building’s main façade, began to stir. Their abundant, lush spring leaves were fluttering, and their blossoms, newly opened, flew everywhere like a flock of birds. The tiny chicken eye in the sky was swelling into an enormous storm cloud. Now for the first time Franz Schwartz, too, looked up. This low, deep, wide sky, which here had always been home to him and which he knew so well, looked menacing. Storm clouds were multiplying out of the dazzling expanse, and behind their foaming edges, the sky glowed red. Dust gusted up on Main Square, too, and disappeared like smoke down Radgona Road. It was then that in the head of Franz Schwartz, former Jewish shopkeeper and deportee, who had just now come back to the town, the sounds of a lost violin, the rumble of thunder and the muffled bang of an officer’s light pistol were all mixed together. But he was unable to make any of it out.

It was dark in the courtyard of Ascher’s house. To the newcomer’s eyes, the only bright thing was the water, which lay in great puddles wherever he turned. He could still hear the raindrops aimlessly striking against the gutters and pouring through many holes onto the veranda. In the extension to the building – the residential part, with two large rooms and a kitchen in the middle – a dim light was burning. In the main part of the building, with the shop, which faced the Hotel Dobray, nothing could be seen. Blackness hung beneath the long eaves, as if night had wrapped itself in cobwebs to keep the stray cats from ripping it apart.

This was the home of Šamuel Ascher, who was lying somewhere on the Count’s land in Rakičan Park. Franz Schwartz had earlier been standing behind a corner of the building, hidden from the eyes of the rare passer-by; he was afraid because he did not yet know who he could show himself to. He knew only what he and Šamuel had heard on their travels: that the war would soon be over. Everybody was saying it was just a matter of days, ten at the most; that was all the victorious Red Army would need to rout the Germans and the Arrow Cross from Hungary and penetrate the heartland of the defeated Reich. People who in the evenings had at their disposal a contraband or confiscated radio also knew that the world had already been divided anew, that in the fashionable setting of Yalta, the Big Three had drawn a line in chalk. Europe, still bleeding, was chopped into two halves, as if the elder brothers, after the death of the father, had each staked his own claim. But clearly, just as sisters and younger brothers tend to be forgotten on such occasions, so, too, it had been forgotten that, for some time now, Europe had consisted of more than just two or three parts.

A light must have come on somewhere. The water in the large puddles, which a little earlier had merely been shimmering, was now lit up. He could distinctly see the last raindrops falling into the black lakes. It was nearly impossible to get to the extension without crossing through water. And he could feel his last strength leaving him. The world seemed to be drowning. He was afraid to take a step, to stride across the courtyard through the puddles and find somewhere he could sit down for a moment and shut his aching eyes. Blind, muddy eyes were staring at him. And there was a hissing in his ears – the rain, pounding somewhere in the distance, was burrowing into his consciousness. He was giving in, sinking. Like a well-trained animal, he lifted his arms high into the air and dropped his head towards the ground. Again he was a captive, disinherited and humbled. He walked as if through water. He was still fully conscious and knew there was no one giving him orders or chasing him or threatening him, but the voice echoing somewhere inside his head was stronger and he could no longer resist it. Something was mightier than any will of his own, as if it was grafted into his bones. Franz Schwartz, camp prisoner, Jew, former wholesaler, hands raised in the air, was sloshing, splashing and trudging through the puddles like a sleepwalking child.

On his weary, ravaged, bony face, covered in a thin, bristly beard, there appeared the barely perceptible outline of a smile. The corners of his mouth were extended and a bloody, swollen tongue was visible between his broken teeth. Whatever his watery eyes then saw, as they widened and opened into the night, he would probably never remember, but that mysterious gleam, which flickered and melted in his eyes, as if in those black lakes – this, certainly, must have somewhere remained.

He dragged himself over to a wall and lay down in the darkest corner of the courtyard. He was used to this watchful hovering in semi-sleep. His body, wrapped in damp, foul-smelling rags, quivered and winced at every noise that came out of the darkness. Although he was trying to rest his eyes, they kept opening, peering into the void lurking inside him. He was walking, was running in his semi-sleep; he could feel his feet sinking in the sodden earth or pounding painfully against the macadamized road, which stretched to infinity. More and more, it seemed, someone else was living inside him, someone he would never know. His body was inhabited by a different consciousness, which kept eluding him, slipping away and always hiding from him. At first it had come merely as a beautiful thought, an illusion that helped him escape reality. When things were at their worst and he felt he might go mad or die, he would cling to the beautiful thought and run far away. Thus hours, days, would go by while he lived as if he had abandoned his body. He would be digging ditches in the muddy snow, burying the dead, starving and marching and sleeping on bunks with people whose faces he never saw and whose names he never learned – but that was only where his empty, emaciated, battered body was living. He himself, meanwhile, would be somewhere else, following the beautiful thought, which protected him and led him down other roads, far from reality and even further from his memories.

But now that he was, as it were, outside, far away from all that and very close to home, he sensed that the illusion, the beautiful thought, had led him astray, almost too far astray. Now, as he was genuinely trying to fall asleep, he was again on the road. He struggled against the beautiful thought and especially against that music, the seductive sound of a violin, inviting him to leave one last time, to go away and vanish completely.

His eyes twitched and opened wide into the darkness at a rustling sound, very close by, which came from the white gravel that covered the little path around the building. He recognized this sound from the years before the war, when he himself had walked over this gravel to see the younger Ascher on social or business visits. The path was always carefully raked and clean. There were never any leaves or gaps, which was surprising, considering how many people came and went here every day.

He was lying next to the wall, absolutely still and covered to his ears by the damp army overcoat, with his hat beneath his head. He first made out the sharp step of a man, who, he was sure, was wearing boots. But there was another step, too, lighter and shorter, woven into the sound. From the way it came precisely mid-stride with the sharper, longer step, he was sure that two people were walking side by side. They were walking without hesitation, as if they were familiar with the path and knew where they were going. Although at first 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 sky. This blue sky and this quietness were all that remained to excite the souls of those who would one day open their eyes.

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.

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.

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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