towards evening, when the soldiers would be hungry and thirsty, when their hearts would yearn for some pungent liquid to rinse out their smoky lungs, that is, even before the sun had set on the endless plain, they would start to believe they could hear the leaves growing.
‘Shoot at anyone who approaches the garden. Don’t let them step into the shadow of those chestnuts,’ József Sárdy concluded his orders as he backed away towards the swinging doors that led upstairs. As his sweaty palm was feeling behind him for the way out, he cast a glance one more time over the lair he was hastily abandoning. In the months he had lived here, he had somehow grown fond of it all, though he would never admit it. Now, as he gazed on the wreckage both outside and within, he was almost sad. He remembered the first day he entered this damned hotel, as he had recently been calling it.
It had been just a few days after Horthy’s capitulation and the seizure of power in Budapest by the Hungarian fascists. The new government of Ferenc Szálasi and his Arrow Cross Party were calling openly for continuing the war alongside the German occupiers, mainly out of fear of the Red Army, which was surging from the east like an unstoppable flood, scattering, destroying and obliterating whatever its terrible waters touched. Everyone knew that this force, which in the stories people were telling was endowed with an almost supernatural power, needed merely a favourable wind before it ploughed across the plain and engulfed the entire wounded Reich, Hungary with it. In March 1944, the only question was the price they would pay to let the Russians flay them – such were the thoughts in those days of the young intern at the military tribunal in Budapest. After the coup and the capitulation, when the home-grown fascists came to power and Hungary was annexed to the Reich, the intern deemed it wise to accept a promotion and leave Budapest, to go somewhere far away, to a province he had never heard of, to a town he could barely find on the map. This pocket of land between the Mura and Raba rivers, at the far edge of his country, seemed a remote and safe enough place to hide and await a possible turnaround – were that, by some strange divine plan, ever to happen. But he did not believe in such a plan, even if he thought the idea itself rather credible – for why would God allow the communists, the sworn enemies of Christ, to destroy them? This, of course, was nothing but a supposition that people were deliberating in the coffee houses of Budapest, as they dreamed of a great Pannonian homeland in which horses grazed and poets wrote great Hungarian poetry, worthy of the former monarchy.
14
That boundless silence and space, where sky and earth bleed into each other and an invisible line makes an arc in the distance, like the momentary gleam of a border no one has yet drawn but which the dead are smuggling themselves across – it was there that something that morning shifted. It was as if an old warship, returning from its final battle, was trapped in a calm. The masts were broken and the tattered sails, hanging over the sides of the weary ship, were soaking in the motionless sea, which was washing the blood off the rotting ropes. The ship’s men, those shattered, sleepy mariners, had been propped motionless in their cramped positions for what seemed an eternity, staring vacantly through their gunports at that invisible border thickening in their desperate hearts. Overhead, high above everything, hung the motionless sun, which spilled out across a childishly clear and innocent 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.
15
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,
