The Rebels (10 page)

My first real knowledge of fear was when one day my father stood in front of the mirror. I can have been hardly more than a toddler. I was sitting in a corner of the workshop on a low stool. We had a lame crow that my father had brought home. We had its wings clipped and it lived with us. I was sitting on the stool, playing with the crow. My father was working away in the room. At that time he had no beard, nor did he hobble. Suddenly he stopped, stood up, and as if I were not there at all went over to the chest of drawers, lifted the mirror off the wall, brought it over to the table, and looked at himself. I stared at him, speechless, nursing the crow in my lap. My father grasped his nose between finger and thumb and pulled it upwards. Then he bared his teeth. He began to swivel his eyes and twist his mouth and pull faces the like of which I had never seen. He carried on doing this for a long time, completely absorbed in it. My mouth gaped wide open as I stared. At first I felt like laughing, but I quickly realized it was nothing to laugh about. My father’s expressions when he swiveled his eyes and twisted his lips were so strange that I began to be afraid. He took a step backward as if preparing to burst into laughter and opened his mouth monstrously wide. He knotted his eyebrows and snarled furiously. Then he began to weep. Suddenly he leapt towards me as if only just noticing my presence. I screamed out, in fear that he wanted to kill me. He leaned over me, his face deformed in a way I had never seen a face before, nor since for that matter. With one hand he grabbed the crow, squeezed the creature’s neck, then threw it in front of me on the floor. Having done so he rushed out.

The crow lay before me lifeless. I had been playing with it for about a year. I picked it up and, since its body was still warm, began to rock and nurse it. That is how I was discovered by my mother, though I never told her what had happened. I think I must have felt that it was not to do with her. My father didn’t come home that night. When he returned the next morning he brought a box into which he placed the crow, took my hand as if nothing had happened, and led me out into the yard.

Here we buried the crow. My father lavished such care on digging the grave and talked to me so cheerfully as he did so that I couldn’t understand what he had been so furious about the day before and why he had to strangle the crow. But ever since then, when I’m left alone in a room with a mirror, I feel afraid in case I too should stand in front of it and start pulling faces.

T
HE WHITE TAILCOAT FITTED
T
IBOR SO SNUGLY
he looked quite a man of the world. They did dress up sometimes. Béla sprawled in a chair wearing his red tailcoat, a top hat on his head, his gloves in his hand. The pettiest things made adequate toys for them in this mood. They could amuse themselves with an idea suggested by an object or the whim of a moment as long and as intensely as a child can play with a simple bell. Now each of them discovered an aptitude for acting.

The one-armed one became a passionate producer. He gave them their tasks in a few words and immediately set up the scene. They played out scenes in court, in close family circles, in recruitment offices, at teachers’ conferences, on the bridges of sinking ships. Every child is a gifted actor. They clung to this forgotten talent, their one recompense for the world they were losing. This world glowed faintly behind the familiar world. Ábel believed that he could recall some episodes and sentences from it.

When they stood facing each other like this in the room, in costume, far from town, with the key turned behind them, in the acrid smoke of stove and tobacco, by the light of two flickering candles, among their stash of stolen things, joined like this in a compact whose rationale they never fully understood, only felt instinctively, there were times, between two sentences of some game, when they fell silent and stared at each other for a while as if there ought to be some explanation for their being together, for the game, for their lives. After one of these shocks to the system that was inevitably succeeded by an interval of wry, ironic dawdling, Ábel suggested that they should play a game of Raid. Ernõ and the one-armed one left the room and the three remaining put on their fancy clothes and adopted poses of leisurely relaxation such as might be assumed by anyone in a secure hiding place. Ernõ gave the door a loud knock. Their task was to explain, employing whatever outlandish vocabulary was available to them, why they were together like this and what they were doing here. Ernõ and the one-armed one represented the forces of the outside world. They had no particular office. They could have been teachers, detectives, a military police patrol, or simply fathers who had sought out their “underlings”—that was the expression Ábel insisted on using—to get them to account for themselves.

Ernõ asked the questions. The one-armed one stood at attention behind him like a member of the domestic staff behind the headmaster, a common foot soldier behind a general, or like a less powerful adult—a nasty uncle, say—behind a father. Ernõ wore a hat and Béla swung his bamboo cane and held his deerskin gloves in his hand as they both walked up and down the room. Every so often he removed his pince-nez and held it before him between finger and thumb to clean it. He had come to a conclusion, he announced, and having discovered them in flagrante, established that they, the pupils, had for some time now been breaking the rules and had without permission of their parents, teachers, their betters, and of civil and military authorities generally, consciously decamped from town so that they might lock themselves away in one room of an inn set in a far from reputable bathing place, where they indulged in smoking and drinking alcoholic drinks and remained there for hours at a time. The sight that greeted the entering authorities was certainly strange.

“Prockauer, stand up. Putting aside the question of your progress, which is regrettably slow, I must admit your recent behavior in school has given no particular cause for complaint. I am sorry to note however that the evidence I see around me constitutes a breach of the rules. What is this? Rum. And that? Grape cider. This box? Rollmop herrings! And what do I see here, Ruzsák? Stand up. Would I be mistaken in assuming that those coffee beans have been purloined from your father’s grocery?”

Béla stood up, fiddling absentmindedly with his gloves.

“Wrong. I only stole money from the shop. I bought the coffee elsewhere with the stolen money.”

So they went on from item to item. Ernõ’s interrogation was thorough and formally impeccable. No one denied anything. They were all prepared to admit the provenance of every object. Lajos exchanged indignant looks with Ernõ. Ernõ’s cross-questioning proceeded slowly, with the sharpest questions addressed primarily to Ábel and Béla.

“Not a word, Prockauer. I shall have particular things to say to you. What is the meaning of this clown costume? Is this how you prepare for exams? How you prepare for life while your fathers are fighting at the front?”

“Excuse me!” Ábel exclaimed. “We are not preparing for life.”

Ernõ placed two candlesticks on the table and politely invited the one-armed one to take a seat.

“What is this nonsense?” he asked. “What else can you be preparing for if not for life?”

“We are not preparing at all, headmaster sir,” Ábel replied calmly. “That is precisely the point. We have taken particular care not to prepare. Life can prepare for whatever it likes. What we are concerned with is something quite different.”

“Utterly different,” Béla nodded.

“Hold your tongue, Ruzsák. You bought coffee beans with stolen money, and therefore have nothing to say. What are you boys up to?”

“What we are trying to do,” answered Ábel in his best school voice, “is to nurture comradeship. We are a gang, if you please. We have nothing to do with what other people get up to. We are not responsible for them.”

“There’s something in that,” agreed the one-armed one.

“But you yourself are responsible,” Ábel retorted. “You agreed to serve and have your arm cut off. People have died on your account. People have died because of Ernõ’s father too. In my humble opinion anyone who takes part in this is responsible for what happens.”

“You lot will shortly be called up,” said Ernõ coldly. “Do you think you will be talking like this then?”

“Naturally not. We won’t be talking then, we will all be responsible, but until then I feel no obligation to acknowledge the rules of their world. Nor those of the music lessons I am currently missing because of a faked parental note, nor those that say it is forbidden to urinate against the walls of the theater in public. Nor those of the world war. That is why we are here.”

“I understand,” said Ernõ. “And what are you doing here?”

They kept silent. Béla examined his nails. Tibor rolled a cigarette.

“Here we are none of their business,” said Ábel. “Don’t you understand yet? I hate what they teach us. I don’t believe what they believe. I don’t respect what they respect. I was always alone with my aunt. I don’t know what will happen now. But I don’t want to live with them, I don’t even want to eat their food. That’s why I’m here. Because here I can thumb my nose at their rules.”

“They? Who are they?” asked Ernõ.

They all began to shout at once.

“The locksmiths for a start!”

“The lawyers!”

“Teacher, baker, what’s the difference?”

“All of them! All of them!”

They kept shouting whatever came into their heads. Béla was bellowing fit to burst. Ábel stood on the bed.

“I tell you we have to escape,” he cried. “On bicycle, on horseback. Now! Through the woods!”

“You can’t cycle through woods,” Tibor remarked like a true sportsman.

They felt they were making progress. Now perhaps they were getting to the heart of the secret. Ábel was shouting himself hoarse.

“Your father is a great idiot!” he bellowed and pointed accusingly at Ernõ. “What have I done? Nothing. My aunt kept sending me into the garden to play because the apartment was damp. So I played there. Your father goes on about the rich. That’s not it: there’s another enemy far more dangerous. It doesn’t matter whether one is rich or poor.”

He made a funnel with his hands and whispered through it. “It’s all of them,” he said, his face pale.

“We will become adults too,” said Ernõ solemnly.

“Maybe. But until then I shall defend myself. That’s all.”

Eventually they collapsed on the bed. Ábel’s face was burning. Tibor sat down beside him.

“Do you really think it’s possible to defend ourselves against them?” asked Tibor in a low voice, his eyes wide.

I
T WAS SPRING AND VISITORS HAD STARTED CALLING
at The Peculiar. The gang became more circumspect in their gatherings. Once or twice a week they managed to get away there in the afternoon but only on Sunday for a whole day. Occasionally they discovered people picnicking in the garden.

So far everything that had happened was entirely between themselves and they felt no guilt about it. They had nothing to do with the mechanisms, rules, and policing of that other world. The “other world”’s significance lay as much in not being allowed to smoke in the street as in the world war. The insults the world showered on them roused them to a similar degree of fury: it was the same whether it was being unable to get bread without ration tickets, the unfair marks awarded by the Latin teacher, someone in the family being killed in action, or being prevented from frequenting the theater without express school permission. They felt that the system that worked against them and dragged them back acted as perniciously in insignificant matters as in great affairs of state. It was hard to say what hurt most: having to offer obsequious greetings to adults they met on the street or the thought of having, in all probability, to salute some sergeant major a few months later.

It was this spring that they lost all sense of proportion. It was not exactly that their games had turned more solemn. Lajos would go off by himself on long walks while they kept a wary eye on him. In certain respects they regarded Lajos as an adult. He was free to do what he wanted and, just as he excused himself from adult ranks as and when he chose, so he might, at any moment, choose to rejoin the enemy. He started wearing his army uniform again and spent the day hanging around with the actor. It seemed he had grown bored of meetings at The Peculiar. He was back in the café. The gang even discussed barring him but then the one-armed one turned up and just at the beginning of the season introduced the gang to the actor.

The introductions took place in Tibor’s room. The actor immediately won their confidence when, out of sheer good manners, he climbed in through the window.

Tibor was the center of the group. Everything revolved around him: they had come together to please him. It was to him they brought their sacrifices and offerings. When the gang abandoned the “for its own sake” principle, there slowly developed a kind of material competition for Tibor’s favors. Ábel wrote poems addressed to him. Béla would bring him presents. Ernõ carried his books, polished his shoes, and undertook all kinds of servant-and-porter tasks for him. Tibor, who had always been courteous, remained remarkably generous and courteous as the object of all this warmth and furious competition.

The younger son of Colonel Prockauer, apart from a passing phase of acne, was, for the gang, that mysterious being, the epitome of all physical perfection. The reputation of Prockauer Junior was much the same in town: so beautiful, so charming. Despite the various boyish accomplishments of running, swimming, riding, leaping, and excelling at tennis Tibor presented a somewhat soft, almost effeminate appearance. His very pale skin and the curiously wavy blond hair that kept falling over his brow covering his blue-gray eyes confirmed the impression. He had inherited his father’s raw fleshy lips as well as the strong oval hands with their short fingers. But the lines of his nose and brow were delicate and mild and the fascinating discrepancy between the upper and lower regions of his face made for a certain uneasiness. His face lacked the normal adolescent’s state of grotesque half-preparedness. It was as if the development of what was boyish in him had been suspended at a particularly fortunate moment in childhood, as if the sculptor had got so far, taken his hand away, and declared with satisfaction: let it remain as it is. Even at thirty Tibor would still look like a boy.