“You, Mr. Zakarka?” asked Ábel and stood up. He wasn’t shocked but he was filled with wonder.
“I had three opportunities. Didn’t my son Ernõ mention these to the young gentlemen? Perhaps he didn’t want to brag about his father’s cleansing, and if so, he did right, because it is proper that the lowly should retain his modesty, even when, out of their goodness, gentlemen permit him to join them. I had three opportunities of being cleansed. Be so gracious as to be informed that the war which the Lord in his goodness allowed to happen so that we might see our sins, offers us mortals few opportunities for cleansing. Aiming a gun and, at a certain distance, bringing down a man is not the same as snuffing out a life with our bare hands, and I do mean precisely that. It is different closing one’s hands about a person’s neck and breaking his vertebra, different from, say, using a sharp implement and wounding a fellow human being, and different again from bombarding someone at a distance with the assistance of certain explosive materials. Cleansing can only occur when a man is directly in touch with death. And, what was more, all three were gentlemen.”
“Who were they?” the boy asked.
They were standing eye to eye. The cobbler leaned closer.
“Czech officers. Traitors from the motherland’s point of view. It was a peculiar act of grace on the colonel’s part, an act for which I will remain eternally grateful to him that he entrusted me with officers, not common people. As I have said, my family stands in especial debt to the Prockauers. I hear the condition of the noble lady has deteriorated.”
“When did you hear?” asked Ábel overeagerly.
He immediately regretted asking the question. The cobbler’s eyes roved round the room then suddenly found and buried themselves in his own, the feeling hot and sharp. It was like looking into dazzling light. He closed his eyes. The condition of Tibor’s mother had been giving cause for concern for several days. It was a strange feeling, this anxiety. They didn’t talk about it. The colonel’s wife had been bed-bound for three years: her condition changed but she didn’t rise from her bed. Her elder son, who had returned a few months previously as an ensign, having lost an arm at the front, stubbornly kept repeating that she was perfectly capable of getting up and simply didn’t want to. He told people that once the boys were in bed at night she would rise from her sickbed and walk about in the apartment. If there was indeed a change in the condition of Tibor’s mother then something had to be done quickly for the colonel might appear any day. He didn’t dare look at the cobbler who stood directly in front of him and who seemed to have grown somewhat in the twilight. Ábel knew he was the same height as the cobbler but felt as though he were being forced to look up at him. The light in the cobbler’s eyes slowly went out. They both looked down.
“It’s nothing to do with me,” said the cobbler. “I humbly beseech the young gentleman not to mention the matter in front of Master Tibor. The elder son of Colonel Prockauer was here earlier, also seeking my son Ernõ. He mentioned it in passing.”
“What?”
The oxyacetylene lamp flared up. The cobbler limped over to the lamp and carefully turned the flame down.
“As people do in conversations. Young Master Lajos, if I may so refer to him, being a fellow soldier on the front and a comrade in arms, has made a significant sacrifice for the homeland. Soldiers who have served at the front look each other up when opportunity affords. We talk of a good many things at such times. Young Master Lajos also made mention of the fact that young Master Tibor was worried. I must not neglect to mention that apart from losing an arm in that great bloodbath, young Master Lajos made a spiritual sacrifice too. He doesn’t remember very much of what he has said. And when he says something, pretty soon after he doesn’t want to know anything about it. In the course of conversation he mentioned that it was not absolutely impossible that there had been some deterioration in the noble lady’s condition. We must prepare ourselves, he said. That’s how I know.”
Ábel knew nothing of this for certain. It could be that the one-armed invalid had imagined it all. The elder of the Prockauer boys was given to strange behavior at times. Once he had avoided and laughed at his younger brother’s circle of friends and their amusements: now he was forever seeking them out. Little by little they included him in everything. He was the first to make the acquaintance of the actor. Ábel thought about it: they had known the actor by sight for a long time, but the one-armed Lajos was the first to introduce himself and get him to meet the others. No doubt he had been his loquacious self.
He talked with the cobbler about Tibor’s anxieties, anxieties that resulted in him betraying their common secret. It would be good to know how far Lajos had taken the cobbler into his confidence. The cobbler was inclined to talk, admittedly in his own peculiar way, though much depended on whom he was addressing. Ernõ told them his father was not a frequenter of bars and that he kept his set speeches about the new order between rich and poor, and on the collapse and rebuilding of the world, for a selected audience.
He had never doubted that the cobbler was not quite right in the head, but the manner in which he performed his speeches was so calm and disciplined that, eye to eye, he did not feel he was talking to a madman any more than when listening to certain views of adults generally. In its proper context, in its own way, everything he said was sober and to the point. When he thought about it he couldn’t quite free himself of the uncomfortable feeling that there was something attractive in the cobbler’s obsession, something he couldn’t just skip over, get on with his life, and ignore. The cobbler fascinated him, but not like Ernõ did, or like Tibor, not even like the actor—nothing like them, quite the contrary in fact, but that contrary was irresistible to him. From time to time he felt obliged to seek the cobbler out.
The cobbler was Ernõ’s father, and Ernõ was one of the gang. Indeed, Ernõ was one of the pillars of the gang. Each time they launched out on something afterwards it seemed to him that the silent and secretive Ernõ had somehow initiated it. He hadn’t known, of course, that the cobbler had actually hanged men at the front. Ábel was taken aback but felt no horror. He looked at the cobbler, at those hands that had furthered the process of “cleansing,” and neither hated nor shrank from them. It was beyond his comprehension: his mind could not grasp it. The whole thing had happened too quickly: childhood, the hothouse, Father’s sessions with the violin, then that something else that other people called the war, but which changed nothing in his life, and suddenly there he was, standing among adults, burdened with guilt and lies, hatching life or death schemes with the gang whose members a year, a day, or one hour earlier were as much children as he had been, living in a different, gentler, tamer world, knowing nothing of danger. They didn’t have time to bother with what the adults were doing. Their fathers went away, their elder brothers were called up, but these obscure and, as far as they were concerned, far from terrible but boring and everyday occurrences, indeed anything anyone did in those faraway places, were of no interest to them. He couldn’t begin to cope with excess knowledge, such as the knowledge that Ernõ’s father had hanged people. That was something to do with fathers and elder brothers. One heard of other things like that. The world he had known had smashed and he felt he was walking on its shards. It might be that in a few weeks or a few months he too would have to hang people. If Mr. Zakarka regarded this as a form of cleansing, that was his business. People cleanse themselves as best they can.
The cobbler often employed the term “cleansing.” Ábel found it attractive but couldn’t understand what exactly he meant by it. The cobbler quoted the Bible. Ábel liked his turn of phrase. His manner of speech affected him like a kind of seductive singing, a singing that was off-key and full of missed notes, yet the voice was alive and full. It had something of the wayside preacher in it. At one point he had referred to himself as “a minor prophet” and lowered his eyes.
Sometimes he had the feeling that the cobbler knew everything about them. He knew some surprising things about the t
own. He rarely left his miserable room, yet it was as though he had invisible emissaries: with a word here and a word there he let slip that he knew what was going on and kept his eyes on everything. He hardly ever spoke when his son was present. When Ernõ entered their poor quarters the cobbler would give a deep bow and fall silent. He would speak respectfully of his son even in his presence but he would never address him directly. Ábel watched him with amazement. Each time he came he had to restrain himself from pouring his heart out to him. Sometimes, just now in fact, as he was walking down the street, he felt an irresistible temptation to call on the cobbler and tell him everything. Perhaps I should ask him to turn the light off, he thought. It would be easier in the dark. It was only a few months since he had made the acquaintance of Ernõ’s father, up till then he had known nothing of him. Thinking it over, he didn’t think he was mad. The cobbler seemed to be of no particular age. He felt closer to him than he did any ordinary adult. It was as if the cobbler, like the gang, was living in that transitional state between childhood and adulthood. The cobbler was neither adult nor child. Like them he seemed to hover in a world between good and evil. He felt the weight of this knowledge as intensely as he would the burden of a terrible secret. He was frightened of the cobbler, though sometimes it felt as though he were the only man who could help him. He was like an adult to look at, but Ábel’s sense of him was of someone in disguise, a child wearing a false beard.
He could never decide whether the cobbler was friend or foe. He employed broad terms: The gentry, he said. The poor. Only sinners may be cleansed. At such times his voice rang like a true preacher’s. His frail, flat tones filled the narrow room.
“As I said,” he ended without any change of pace, “my son Ernõ is in the coffeehouse with the young gentlemen. Custom now openly permits him to frequent places reserved for adult gentlemen.”
He bowed and sat back down on his chair and picked up his work as though there was no one else present. Ábel stood beside him and watched him as he leaned, bent-backed, over the sole and pricked a series of tiny holes at the perimeter of the leather strip with his auger. Ábel had come to tell him everything, to talk about Tibor and the actor, to ask him for help in the face of the danger that was threatening them all. Now that he was staring at the cobbler’s wire-wig hair his nerve failed him again. Whatever is said out loud has life. He quietly and timidly took his leave, though the cobbler was no longer paying attention to him. When he reached the steps the cobbler spoke. Astonished, Ábel turned round and saw the cobbler was laughing.
“We will all be cleansed,” said the cobbler and raised his leather-knife. His face was radiant.
IT WAS INDEED POSSIBLE THAT THEY WOULD ALL be cleansed. He walked slowly beside the wall, aimlessly, as if he had no particular place to go. The gang would surely be waiting for him by now. The pack of cards was weighing down his pocket. It was a warm evening, uneasily warm. Some time that afternoon there must have been rain that covered the street with a thin, soft sheen of light, but as evening approached a wind got up in the hills and within a few minutes had dried the surfaces. A balmy haze of warmth drifted through the air conveyed to town by freshly swollen fields when the mist of the spring evening rises and dew begins to settle in the pores of the skin.
He had turned eighteen in April but looked younger than that. Down the school corridors, just before you reached the conference rooms, there was a group of old class photographs on display. He had often studied them, surprised at how different he and his generation looked from those who had graduated ten or twenty years ago. They were enormous mature men, almost without exception. Though most of their faces looked young, there were those among them who seemed fully adult. There were one or two with fine curling mustaches. Next to them Ábel’s friends looked like children in short pants. It was as if with every year that passed the generations had grown softer and more childish. He found the picture of his father’s graduation year. There was Kikinday the judge, Kronauer the colonel in the medical corps, and there was his father too: all proper adults. Kronauer had a sharp mustache, checkered trousers, and a coat after the French fashion. He held a tall hat in his hands. His father was manly, broad-shouldered. He was practically all man, differing from the figure Ábel knew only in that he lacked the latter’s addition of a beard. But you could imagine him bearded even then, twenty-four years ago. He wondered how he himself would look if he grew a beard or a mustache. Thinking that, he gave a bitter grin. It was unlikely he would get that far because his face was still completely smooth and white, lacking any sign of whiskers, lacking even the ghost of a mustache. His hands were small too, like a child’s. Perhaps humanity degenerated year by year. But it was also possible that they were evolving. The Japanese were small too, refined, and yet looked older.
He had begun to read two years ago. He read unsystematically, whatever came to hand. One day he wrote something. He was fifteen. When he saw the piece of paper with his writing on it he got a fright and hid it in his drawer. The next day he took it out and read it. It wasn’t poetry but it didn’t seem to be quite prose either. It scared him so he tore it up. His fear persisted for days. At that time he was still inhabiting “this” side of life. There was no one he dared talk to. What was this? Why did he write it down? What does it mean when a man picks up a pen and writes something? When something simply comes to him and it appears there, complete, in his writing? Why should he have done that? Is this what writers do? He had come across a book once that someone had brought home from the front. It was a Russian book, full of Russian script. A novel. The author was anonymous. He could not help but feel shaken when he thought of it. Somewhere in Russia there lived this anonymous figure conjuring characters, events, and entire tragedies out of nothing, committing them to paper, a spirit floating over an immense distance, and here he was holding it in his hands.
He stopped in front of the bookshop window and ran a melancholy eye over the books. Books hid some secret, not precisely in what they said, but in the reason for them being written at all. There wasn’t anybody he could discuss this with. He did try occasionally with Ernõ, but Ernõ always seemed to be speaking of something else and they failed to communicate with each other. Ernõ talked about the books’ “contents.” He knew that was of secondary importance. What he wanted to know was why the books existed. Do they bring joy to those who write them? He felt they must cause more pain than pleasure. And if you write something down, is it then lost, does it have nothing to do with you any more, is there only a memory, an ache, left behind, as if you had been found guilty of something, something for which, sooner or later, you would have to answer?
He wrote a few poems. He described somebody’s appearance or a conversation he had overheard in the street. No one knew he had done this, not the gang and certainly not his aunt. Tibor was only interested in sports, the theater, and girls. For Béla it was fashion and girls. The one-armed one was utterly fixated on girls. It was difficult to know what interested Ernõ. He was a passionate chess player. An excellent mathematician. But the mystery of why someone sat down each night to commit whatever he had seen or heard to paper was of absolutely no interest to him.
He sat alone in his room at night, a sheet of paper before him, but it was his father’s secret sessions with the violin that came to mind, which made him blush, so he quickly rose from the table, lay down, and immediately turned off the light. He knew what he was doing was not the real thing. It was no more than what his father was doing when he played the violin. And it wasn’t simply a matter of someone writing down what he had seen and heard during the day. There was always something beyond such events, some secret, some meaning, some connection between them that he should discover, seize on, and articulate. One day he found a copy of War and Peace. When he got as far as the scene where the prince returns from the battlefield and sees his dead wife whose expression seems to be asking “What have you done to me?” he shuddered. He felt someone had expressed a thought that could probably not be articulated i
n words. It was something that affected the whole realm of human experience. “What have you done to me?”
He reached the high street. The city shimmered with weak light like an invalid’s bedroom. Couples were still strolling in crowds down the avenue: in the theater the performance had just begun. Some officers were standing around in front of Béla’s father’s delicatessen, chatting with the hunchbacked chemist who had an intimate knowledge of the town and its affairs. They were sizing up the girls and the chemist was helping them by revealing their interesting little secrets. Now and then they burst out in a storm of laughter. They were on leave, wounded, each one wearing one of the uniforms of the front. The chemist covered his mouth with his hand.
Opposite the theater, in front of the café, stood the actor leaning on an advertising pillar. The one-armed one was with him, loudly explaining something. When Ábel reached them the actor greeted him with a profound bow.
“We were waiting for you, my angel,” he said.
THE ACTOR HAD ARRIVED IN TOWN WITH THE company in the early autumn, saying he had had a contract in the capital first, but the theater had closed. He was forty-five years old but claimed to be thirty-five. Not even the gang believed this though they eagerly swallowed everything else he told them. He tended to play comic, dancing roles but referred to himself as a ballet instructor. The contract laid down that the company was obliged to supply divas and leading men each season for a few highlights from popular operettas. It was the comedian-dancer’s task to teach them the appropriate elements of ballet.
He had put on weight, developing a proper paunch and jowls, a rare thing in the world of comedians and dancers. The audience liked him because he included a lot of current gossip in his act. He wore a wig of light chestnut color. His head was large and equine. His jaw was thrust forward and he was so near-sighted that he couldn’t see the prompter’s box, but he refused to wear glasses out of vanity, not even in real life, as he put it.