some entirely different message, he didn’t know. They may have seemed quite innocent last night (as much as he could judge, of course), but now everything had changed.
‘Give me my gun! I’m going!’ the man said sharply, again rapping nervously on the windows.
‘So go!’ he heard a voice say firmly. ‘And take your pistol, I’m not keeping it from you.’
‘Damn whore, I’ll teach you to coddle guns,’ the man replied and ran back inside. Franz Schwartz now seized his chance and with great difficulty dragged himself away from the building. He was already expecting the man to come around the corner and discover him when his eyes fell on a summer house standing some ten yards away.
In better days it had always been freshly whitewashed. It stood in the shade of a huge plane tree, one of those that had been planted when they were putting in the trees along Main Street, by which he had arrived here. It was in the summer house – which in winter was glazed and filled with plants that spent the cold months there, while in summer people would sit in it late into the night by the light of a paraffin lamp – it was here, then, in this pavilion where Franz Schwartz now sought shelter, that the elder Ascher would usually bring his most demanding or most valued customers, usually bankers and wholesalers, as well as those who owed him money, and it was here, at the same round table beneath which he was now lying, that they would negotiate a settlement on the debt or arrange some big Sóbota business deal. It all came back to him clearly once he had hidden himself again. Now he was nothing but ears, listening to every movement or possible word that might tell him if he should be afraid of those two or if he could trust them – maybe they could even get him back to Rakičan, where Šamuel Ascher still lay, the man in whose house all of this was happening. They were obviously very much at home here: they had known exactly where the path was in the dark and when he arrived there had been a light burning faintly in the windows, which they, most likely, had left on – but he couldn’t remember them from anywhere, and he knew almost everyone who used to come here, since he, too, had been a regular visitor. So those two people, and maybe there were more inside, must have come later, after all the Jews had been deported from town.
The house had been empty; it stood on a corner of the town’s main intersection, opposite the only hotel in which the last Hungarian soldiers were now struggling on, held together by nothing but the mad persistence of József Sárdy, secretary of the Office of the Special Military Tribunal. Precisely because it was so visible, and was Jewish, too (as people said here), which meant that the owners were certainly dead, their bodies in a shallow grave somewhere in the depths of the Pannonian plain, in Hungary or Poland, maybe where no living person would ever find them again – for precisely these reasons, this house was the perfect place for people to visit from time to time, or even to secretly occupy; so concluded the man who was shivering on a damp floor littered with leaves and rubbish in a ramshackle summer house.
12
Across the street, at the filthy, rundown Hotel Dobray, the red curtain was still hanging out of the window. In the morning calm, when there was no one yet to be seen and only shadows were trailing down the soft, well-soaked streets, the curtain looked like a banner for the dead which some drunks must have dropped before collapsing in pools of booze. The soldiers, who were lying intoxicated on chairs and tables, did not actually know any more to whose army they belonged. They were now pretending to defend the last remaining fort in a senseless world, in a town that had been isolated all these years, playing at its own war, on land that belonged to nobody knew who. For decades, governments and armies had come and gone in turn, each with its own law in its own language, which sought to convince people that it alone was the true and proper law. So it was that in this little varaš people spoke and wrote for a long time in Hungarian, and then, again, in Prekmurian, which in a way was a mixture of all these languages. Many swore oaths in German, Serbian and even Czech; nor should one forget that Romany was spoken here, and Hebrew, of course, and in the year before the war many had started writing in Slovene, which was said to be the only proper language for everyone, on either side of the Mura.
Now, for a second time, war had rocked this marvellous chicken coop, where wild and domestic fowl alike crowded beneath the same rickety, leaky roof. And it was in this squalid, crappy hen’s nest, as József Sárdy, secretary of the Office of the Special Military Tribunal, had recently taken to saying, that they were all going to croak. That same secretary, left without the army and tribunal in whose name he made decisions, now realized that he would have to take things into his own hands. He had introduced a few drastic measures the previous afternoon and had been refining them throughout the long night.
‘Everyone to arms!’ he ordered, now that the pointless gunfire with the woman had somehow ended. At the thought of his woman, that devoted creature Sugar Neni, who alone had truly remained by their side in this senseless war, he felt, perhaps for the only time, real and genuine pain. Not even she is completely mine, it dawned on him. Nothing in this world is mine. Just like these soldiers and this crappy town, which no one gives a damn about and never did, this woman, too, was not his. Nothing is mine. He had never been able to admit that apart from that pompous title – Secretary of the Office of the Special Military Tribunal – nothing was actually his. It was only when he called those debauched and drunken soldiers to arms, which they had probably forgotten how to use, and with his own hands herded each of them to an open window, to gaze out on the empty streets, which were now being washed in a slow rain – only then did he feel that it would have been better, would have been only right, if the woman had shot him, or at least wounded him. That would have been his only actual bleeding wound, something that might outweigh all the senseless waiting he was doing in this chicken coop. But the shot from his little gun had gone into a wall somewhere.
And everyone whose head I’ve ever blown off will go on staring at me from that other world – a world he couldn’t name even though he was seeing it more and more often. It had to exist somewhere, for he heard all those dead men calling to him, reminding him, but mainly they were gawping at him with their pale, vacant eyes.
13
The army of József Sárdy, secretary of the Office of the Special Military Tribunal, assumed their positions one last time – which they all very well knew. Private Kolosváry, however, a man who had somehow managed to preserve his common sense and, more importantly, a particle of clear-headedness, or it might have been the voice of a conscience not utterly ruined by Laci’s booze, that palinka – in any case, the soldier now felt a serious urge to quit, to step away and simply lay down his weapon; he was almost ready to desert, even at the price of a bullet in the head from the very pistol his commanding officer had been brooding over a little while earlier.
Kolosváry was crouching by the wall, beneath the last of the long row of tall, wide-open windows in the coffee house. From here the view looked out on a clear expanse, in which Main Square stood encircled by a broad, muddy cartway. To the right, a row of abandoned Jewish shops abutted the sodden thoroughfare, and somewhere in the middle, set back from the road, the steeple of the Lutheran church was jutting into the sky; a little further on, Main Street turned into Lendava Road. This, presumably, was the direction from which the thing they all feared would come.
More and more rumours, intimations, conjectures and prophecies were circulating, as well as visions and dreams, from both the sick and the seemingly well, which rivalled each other in the horror, detail and strength of their description of what was coming from far away, from the deepest, darkest plains, where the sun only rarely shone. Fear was always foremost in these images – fear of the devil, godlessness, chaos, debauchery, unbridled lust, alcohol, looting, the burning of money and the rejection of every sort of law, whether earthly or heavenly.
The sleepy and still intoxicated soldiers set their rifles on the windowsills and waited half-dozing with flushed faces. Their watery gazes were lost in the distance. The only thing constantly before their eyes were the tall chestnuts in the hotel’s garden, and it was these they held in
