the bench in front of the Italbolt.
As for Kormány Lajos, whom everyone credited with being the body whose hand had catapulted the stone through Pinlinszky’s window, neither he nor Gyula and Roland were anywhere to be seen. Rumors began to circulate that the foursome had stolen a car from the junkyard in nearby Szigliget and taken off for Transylvania. Nonetheless, fears that one or more of them, stones, blades or shotguns in hand, could resurface at any moment were more than enough to cast a melancholic pall over the village’s usual summer rituals of pig roasts, bonfires, wine tastings and infidelities.
Several nights after the shattering of Fischer’s window, Kepes, Fischer, the Mayor, and—at Etus’s urging—Árpi were meeting at the now-deserted Italbolt to discuss what action might be taken to restore peace and tranquility to the Hegymagasian summer.
“We must,” inveighed Kepes, “despite what has happened to our poor neighbor Fischer’s window, and to Árpi’s pig, allow an atmosphere of generosity and forgiveness to prevail.”
“Yes,” seconded the Mayor. “We are a small and peaceful village. We must love one another or die.”
Fischer, still contemplating the replacement cost of his destroyed window and his unsalvageable oleander, remained silent for a rare moment, as if contemplating not merely his own destiny, but the world’s future.
Árpi lifted a glass of plum pálinka skyward in a rather elegant arc, coming to a halt at his lips. “Yes,” he agreed, making a slurping noise with his tongue and casting a lascivious eye toward Kati the bartender, “we should all kiss and make up . . . for my mother’s sake if no one else’s. And who knows?—Kadar’s tail may yet grow back.”
“Well,” Fischer broke his silence with the reluctance of someone at an auction contemplating whether to bid far more than he had intended, “I’m not so sure. Peace and forgiveness have their place in the world, but so does justice. First it’s poor Fekete, then my clerestory window, and now Kadar’s tail. I, personally, have had more than my fill of those four bums and their troublemaking. Who knows what it will be next?
“It’s about time,” he continued, no doubt thinking about his own offspring, “that we set a better example for our children, and I see no reason why we shouldn’t begin right here and now.”
“It’s not exactly as if the two of you have been standing passively by watching the whole thing from the sidelines,” the Mayor reminded Fischer, taking on a rather scolding tone. “I think that Kormány’s sheep, Gyula’s parrot, Feri’s gumicsizma and Roland’s arm are a more than adequate display of village justice, don’t you?”
“I’m not sure.” Fischer seemed to be trying hard, at this point, to restrain a faint smile from trickling onto his lips. “I’m not at all sure.”
***
Yet another week went by, with still no sign of the fabulous foursome, or, for that matter, of the village’s usual spirit of lightheartedness and conviviality. Sipos Lajos, a carpenter from nearby Káptalantóti, was hard at work repairing Fischer’s window, and Árpi and Kadar—the latter with a splint and massive bandage appended to its disfigured tail—kept a hesitant vigil up in the vineyard.
A resonant emptiness—punctuated, periodically, by a visit by Kepes and Fischer for a glass of Slivovitz—echoed from the Italbolt, and even the village’s two garrulous Germans, Kronzucker and his wife Ulrike, seemed to have decided to curtail their weekly invitations for Bratwurst und Hefeweise at their backyard barbecue.
On this particularly torrid night, with a severe summer thunderstorm threatening, Horvath, Kepes, and Fischer were once again seated in the bar, a funereal pall having been cast over the former’s attempts at peacemaking by the latter’s intransigence and the other’s relative apathy.
“I guess it’s going to be a long, unfriendly summer,” Kepes remarked, lighting one of his socialist-era Kossuth cigarettes. “A very long summer.”
Suddenly, the front door of the Italbolt flew open, and in stumbled Feri, bootless and forlorn-seeming, his mud-strewn Yankee cap tilted to one side à la DiMaggio, a guitar with two broken strings grasped rather tentatively in his left hand. He was obviously drunk—more drunk, even, than usual—and, placing the guitar on one knee as he leaned backward against the ice cream freezer, began singing a bizarrely Hungarianized take on an old Peter, Paul, and Mary tune, now titled “Hova lett a sok halászlé?”—“Where has all the fish soup gone?”
“What a crazy sonuvabitch,” Fischer muttered under his breath, lifting his beaker of Slivovitz to his lips.
“I think it’s rather touching, in its own way,” Kepes observed. “The poor boy is merely a creative spirit gone astray.”
There was, however, on this particular occasion, a bit more to Feri’s melancholic tune than mere drunken creativity. “Why don’t you take a look outside, my friends,” he interrupted his tune to suggest. Followed closely by Kepes, Fischer made his way to the Italbolt door, from where—gathered across the street on the Post Office lawn beneath a blackening sky—he observed an incredible sight: NO MORE COOKING UNTIL WE HAVE PEACE! The two men read out loud from the large cardboard placard being held up on the post office lawn by none other than Etus néni, Terika néni, Vera néni, Rosza néni, Zsuza néni, Anikó néni and Kati néni—in other words, by all seven of the village’s surviving widows! The town’s women, led by Vera néni, had apparently decided that—Hungarian morality traveling, as it did, through the lower regions of the body—they would try and put an end to the summer’s hatreds and retributions by organizing a kind of culinary work stoppage.
“I don’t believe it,” Fischer turned incredulously to Kepes, who was unable to keep a hardly faint smile from trickling onto his lips. “Those crazy broads are actually organizing a strike!”
***
A strike, indeed, it turned out to be, as, over the next several days, the village’s usually abundant supply of fish soup, túrós rétes, paprikás csirke, mákos gombos, pörkolt, gulyás, and Hortobágyi palacsinta virtually dried up. The men of the village found themselves increasingly dependent on the fare offered by the grease-laden and radically overpriced Szent György Pince, or the more reasonably priced, but quantitatively miniscule, offerings at Jóska Bácsi’s new roadside restaurant, which simultaneously ran jeep tours of the vineyard, guided by the chef. Worse yet, many of them reverted to the sort of all-liquid diet that had already taken its toll on far too many Hungarians, both famous and infamous, in the past.
By the third day of the strike, Fischer was suffering from stomach cramps and diarrhea, Kepes’s ulcer had been aggravated by an excess of alcohol, and even the Mayor, whose damaged pancreas dictated a diet at some remove from the Hungarian norm (which his wife, before going on strike, had lovingly supplied) began suffering from severe nausea and insomnia.
Feri himself, somehow inspired to new levels of eloquence and sobriety by the strike, began, oddly enough, serving as a kind of middleman between the village’s peace-loving and newly undomesticated women and its disputatious men. “All they are saying,” he informed Horvath and Fischer later that week at the Italbolt, borrowing a line from one of his heroes, “is give peace a chance.”
Fischer, looking rather anemically pale, was cast into a state of profound reflection by Feri’s borrowed words. “Well,” he said, somehow forcing a conciliatory expression onto his features, “perhaps they have a point . . . This is getting
