sweat-stained beds. The men, who in the street or at military headquarters conveyed an image of manliness and heartlessness, had in recent days been avoiding the staircase that led to the hotel’s upper floor. Always a little drunk, sometimes very drunk, and with bloody saliva in their mouths, they were acting like boys who wanted to spend just one more night with their sweethearts but in their thoughts were already home, somewhere far away, where what awaited them was something they feared more than all the madness and bloodshed here. They knew that from now on things would never again be as they had once been.
The telephone, which had been placed in the middle of the long counter, remained silent. The soldiers and junior officers were smoking dry tobacco and knocking back glasses of spirits. Everything was gradually running out, the same way their patience was dwindling and their anxiety increasing, the same way their tobacco was running out and the fear inside them was swelling. The hotel’s coffee house was in a more or less woeful condition. For the past month, virtually none of the townsfolk had set foot there. The mood was no different on the other side of the counter. The man tending the bar, the only employee left, who had stayed out of some coffee-house ethic no one now understood – Laci, the maître d’hôtel, was comporting himself like the captain of a slowly sinking ship. His cooks, cellarmen, barmen and managers had long ago fled. Laci struggled on alone, waiting tables, purchasing liquor in the middle of the night from black marketeers who mercilessly fleeced him, washing dishes and carrying drunken soldiers on his shoulders to the storeroom to sleep it off. He no longer had the strength to deliver them to the women upstairs. The only thing he truly neglected these days was the cleaning, which had never been his job, and he wasn’t about to take it on now.
Cleaning, tidying up, scrubbing floors – that was his inner boundary and he couldn’t cross it. So with each passing day the hotel looked more and more like the kind of seedy dive that could be found in growing numbers in cellars all around here. The only difference was that he still had the feeling that he was operating legally, that he was abiding by the ordinances and regulations which were posted on the walls. In his almost mad perseverance, even when everything was slowly going to hell, he could best be compared to the ladies upstairs lying devotedly on their filthy bed sheets. Laci and his ladies were the last mariners on board, the only remaining hope for order, lawfulness and professional ethics in the black coffee slime that was relentlessly engulfing everything.
‘Get ready, men, the Secretary is coming,’ said Laci the hotelier; he was the first to hear a woman’s cries and the gallop of male feet descending the hotel’s creaking staircase. It wasn’t so long ago that gentlemen would come down these same stairs with slow, tired footsteps, from the casino that had been operating for many years on the first floor.
Laci could still recall the mornings he would wait by the door for the last of the gamblers, who left the hotel feeling relieved and with that mysterious smile on their faces. There were usually gypsies waiting for them on the doorstep, who had come here for one last dinar. These musicians performed in pubs and coffee houses around town and beyond, but in the morning they would come here, since the casino was open all night. Sometimes several bands would stand beneath the chestnuts all at the same time, all waiting, almost competing to see who could play the saddest, most heart-rending melody.
The gentlemen had always saved them a dinar or two in the hope that the musicians, with their fiddles, basses and accordions, would accompany them along the dewy streets on their way home. The gypsies, who all knew who lived where, would withdraw at just the right moment, so as not to wake the wives and children of these drunk and strangely melancholy men who had been up all night playing cards.
József Sárdy, secretary of the Office of the Special Military Tribunal, stepped through the swinging doors and surveyed his army. At Laci’s warning, the men had strapped on their belts as best they could and pushed their glasses to the end of the counter, but they were unable to hide their tipsy and demoralized state. Their condition, indeed, was not unlike that of the coffee house itself. Overturned chairs were scattered about the room, a few on the tables where they’d been for days; the curtains were perforated with cigarette holes, while the floor was strewn with old newspapers, on which the soldiers would wipe their boots. Only the chandeliers, which hung high overhead, still testified to the evenings when fine gentlemen used to sit beneath them.
A bit of yellowish light, penetrating the leafy chestnuts in the courtyard, was now caught in the dusty globes of glass beneath the ceiling and painted a rainbow across the walls. Perhaps it was merely a play of light, which might possibly be interpreted as a sign that the eye looking down on them was also present, or perhaps it was some unfathomable irony, even mockery of everything happening here. But its true importance, or more specifically, its meaning, was at that moment lost on József Sárdy, secretary of the Office of the Special Military Tribunal, who in fact had not understood anything for a long time.
‘You’re exactly the same as those tarts, those damn whores!’ he swore at the men. ‘I knew this would end up as one big whorehouse. The world is sinking in black mud and all you do is wait for something to happen. Well, let me tell you, it won’t be long before you’re pissing blood, and not from Laci’s booze either. But first the Reds will stuff our guts with maize, and then you worthless swine will see how the godless pray!’
József Sárdy, secretary of the Office of the Special Military Tribunal, didn’t wait for an answer – he knew that no one here would dare say a thing to him. So now his words just bounced off the crumbling walls. In the only remaining hotel far and wide, nothing was heard but the trickle of the liquor Laci was pouring from a wicker bottle into the shot glasses. But before the last drop had fallen, there again came the sound from upstairs of a woman shouting.
‘You bastard, you goddamn good-for-nothing!’ Sugar Neni was screaming – that’s what everybody called her. She was the main woman here. Before the war, there were almost always seven ladies upstairs, who regularly, every evening, would sit in front of the doors of three rooms, if they weren’t entertaining gentlemen in the casino or coffee house. They normally sat at the same table with the fiddlers, who didn’t always consider this an honour. Now, when very few men had the courage to enter this soldiers’ lair, and those who did were usually smugglers, drunks or freethinkers of dubious provenance, these ladies, too, were left without company or business. Only three still slept upstairs: Sugar Neni and two orphans, who had stayed on simply because they had nowhere else to go. If they went somewhere in town, they were sure to be torn apart by the half-starved dogs of the silent, virtuous townsfolk. People here still believed that the evil that had befallen them in these terrible years was spawned from moral indecency – from indecency in general. Indeed, one had only to look down the street or, perhaps, step into one of those once respectable houses, to be firmly convinced of this. Not even fine ladies and gentlemen were what they once were. No one could hide the black crescents beneath their fingernails or the yellowed collars on their once-starched shirts. But what most struck the eye was the mud, which could be seen everywhere, as if the earth had been soiling itself these past few years.
‘I’m gonna kill ya! I’m gonna shoot ya right now!’ Sugar Neni shouted from the top of the stairs. And now the soldiers were truly alarmed, as if a woman’s words were the only thing able to bring them to their senses, at least for a moment. And then she was downstairs, barefoot and wearing only a slip, which hung off her bony, famished body like the white flag of a vanquished army. In her hands she held, not without difficulty, an officer’s light pistol pressed against her face. The rouge on her cheeks, which had been made from paprika, was dissolving in her cold tears. Her hair was damp and matted in strands, which fell behind her ears, of which the right one was missing its earring.
József Sárdy, secretary of the Office of the Special Military Tribunal, before making any other move, lowered his left hand to his belt and felt for his weapon. He knew beyond a doubt that the firearm was his; he would have recognized it in the dark, so often had he polished, displayed and of course used it. Now, as he stood for the first time on the other side of its short, thin barrel, the pistol had never seemed more beautiful to him. Although from this same
