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.
2
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.
3
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,
