a black-and-red woolen ski cap that looked as if it had originally been skied in during the reign of Kaiser Franz Joseph, and a New York Yankees baseball cap, he was known—for the village’s annual Szent Lörinc Festival dance following the soccer match between Hegymagas and neighboring Káptalantóti—to treat himself to a much-welcomed shower and shave, after which he would don the dark gray wool suit that had once been his father’s.
Feri senior, the former village postmaster, had been run over by a mule-drawn Gypsy cart ten years earlier while staggering home from his mistress’s house in neighboring Raposka. His father’s death and the suicide of his retarded younger sister, which followed almost immediately upon it, had driven the boy (everyone referred to him as “the boy,” though he was nearly forty) only deeper into the inertia of village life, so that he was now as much a fixture on the wooden bench outside the Italbolt as was the pub’s bench itself, rousing himself into action only when some sort of entertainment—such as the soccer match or, everyone now speculated, the shooting of Etus’s dog—was offered in its place.
The bite on Kormány Lajos’s leg, in fact, had been a bad one, and it was the universal sentiment that Kormány—a frequent trespasser on, and pilferer from, the largely unoccupied vineyard houses—had probably trespassed one too many times on Árpi’s three grape-filled hectares, thus becoming the object of Bori’s, and his master’s, proprietary instincts.
Etus, on the other hand, was the best loved of the village’s large group of widowed nénis, a woman of boundless generosity and good will who—in addition to being the traditional winner of the annual fish soup contest each August—was known to wander from house to house, distributing ears of corn and the small unsweetened round cakes known as pogácsa to the children and the bedridden, her tattered and (to the dismay of all who loved her) foul-smelling apron tied around her neck and a good word for everyone on her lips.
Etus had adopted Fekete several years earlier, when the dog followed her home on her bicycle from the market in Tapolca. She could still ride long distances in those days, and the two of them had been virtually inseparable ever since, the dog following loyally at Etus’s feet as she made her way from the vineyard to the pub on her various missions of mercy. Fekete, a small, affectionate, though somewhat yappy animal, was hardly prone to outbreaks of aggressiveness unless severely provoked or, it turned out, finding itself in Árpi’s immediate vicinity, where—much like his more formidable cousin Bori—he experienced a kind of transformation of personality consonant with Árpi’s ornery and frequently inebriated ways.
On the day of the incident that led to Fekete’s death, Kormány, having downed one too many pálinkas for breakfast, had apparently wandered onto the perimeters of Árpi’s vineyard as he set off into the hills. The two men had had a history of altercations, large and small, dating back some ten years earlier when Kormány had sold Árpi a supposedly reconditioned Trabant station wagon for 20,000 forints, only to have the engine utter its last gasp before its new owner could even make it to Tapolca for a new front fender.
On the morning in question Árpi, suffering from a headache and hangover, was not at all disappointed to see Kormány staggering toward him and eagerly sent Bori, chomping at the bit, off in the trespasser’s direction. It was only seconds later that a howl reverberated throughout the vineyards, as the dog’s sharp canine teeth tore through Kormány’s three-generation-old overalls and nestled in his right leg, penetrating all the way through the flesh and into the fibula.
Kormány’s wife, a nurse in the local hospital, seemed to take a certain private glee in her husband’s injury. Nonetheless, she was reluctantly summoned to bandage the wound and check the dog for rabies, her negative verdict concerning which did little to alleviate either Kormány’s anger, or his pain.
Kormány, in fact, had never been terribly fond of Etus, having long felt that her virtual lock on the annual fish soup prize was one of the reasons for his own mother’s premature death from a cardiac infarction—he described it as a “fish-soup-broken heart”—two years earlier. The elder Aunt Kormány’s concoction, her son knew, had been far superior to Etus’s soup, and it was only the sentimental admiration in which Etus and her family were held—as contrasted with the distance most of the villagers kept from the legendarily drunken Kormány clan—that, he was certain, explained such an undeserved monopoly.
Gyula, the eldest of the foursome, had once made what seemed a reasonable living as a go-between in the summer rental market for vineyard houses to Austrian tourists. But he had fallen victim, both to his increasing penchant for women and drink, and his inability to accommodate his rather lackadaisical spirit to the realities of the new market economy. Each passing year found him spending more and more of his time at the Italbolt in the company of Roland, a former carpenter who had severed his right hand with a chainsaw while drunk three years earlier, and less and less time at the “business office”—a three-legged kitchen table supported by bricks, on top of which was perched a 1928 maroon Continental typewriter—he had set up in his widowed mother’s pantry.
So—when news of Kormány Lajos’s wounding spread from the vineyard to the ABC store, and then from the ABC store to the pub—it took little in the way of urging for the wounded victim to recruit Gyula and Roland to the righteousness of his quest for vengeance against relatively affluent, and well-respected, Etus and her clan.
Etus herself, who spent much of her time baking cheese strudel to be sold at the beach in nearby Szigliget, was hardly a vindictive sort, and—wounded as she was by the violent death of her beloved puli—would have preferred to let the incident pass and get on with her acts of charity and culinary generosity. Nor was Árpi, whose drinking and carousing Etus was convinced had caused the premature death of his father some twenty years earlier, easily aroused from his usual, less than fully conscious, state on his mother’s behalf.
But the writer Fischer and the sculptor, Kepes, both of whose families had been longtime friends of Etus’s, felt particularly aggrieved by Fekete’s death and the consigning of Etus to a kind of second widowhood. The day after the killing, they took it upon themselves to pay a visit to the Mayor, Horvath János, to inquire as to what justice could be rendered the cold-blooded killers of Etus’s dog.
Horvath János was a firm believer in maintaining the village’s veneer of tranquility at all costs. He had for years been witness to the “revolving door” of trying to tame the impulses of the troublesome quartet—periodic short-term jailings in nearby Tapolca, accompanied by repeated reprimands by both himself and the local police chief—none of which had resulted in even the slightest change in their behavior.
“Kedves barátaim,” he addressed Fischer and Kepes as he invited them into his winemaking house on Szent György hill. “My dear friends…There is really nothing I can do about this matter. It is, after all, only a dog, and not a human being, that has been put to death.”
“Yes, of course, it’s a dog,” Fischer, not one to be easily intimidated, replied, “but it’s a widow’s dog—a widow, I might add, who has been a source of kindness in this village for more than sixty years—and I don’t think we should merely stand by and do nothing when poor Etus’s companion—an innocent dog, at that—is murdered in cold blood by four no-good drunkards.”
“I agree,” Kepes, who rarely left the confines of his newly converted studio, even to go to the Lake, and had been dragged along by Fischer, concurred. “It is not good for the village’s reputation,” he added, appealing to an area he knew to be high on the list of the Mayor’s concerns, “for the dogs of our widows to be randomly slaughtered.”
Kepes’s appeal to Hegymagas’s public relations seemed to have a momentary impact on the Mayor, who paused to remove the glass borlopó he had been using to fill a bottle of Chardonnay from a wooden cask from his lips.
“Yes,”
