The Rebels (11 page)

In every movement, in each appearance, whenever he laughed or spoke to somebody, whenever he thanked another with a smile, a characteristic rhythm or pace made itself felt, a light and almost shy courtesy. Unlike Béla and Ernõ, or his contemporaries generally, he seemed to utter foul language with a kind of reluctance, as if he had first to overcome some better part of himself. His profanities appeared to be a form of good manners, an aspect of his courtesy to the others whom he did not wish to shame by remaining silent while they swore.

He did not say much. Something about his being, the way he looked, suggested astonishment. Whenever Ábel or Ernõ were speaking he had the knack of moving in close and with wide-open eyes paying them the utmost attention, then asking the simplest and most admiring of questions, always acknowledging the answer with a graceful smile. It was hard to tell whether the consideration that he radiated had been intensely cultivated or was the result of an entirely unselfconscious curiosity. Books frightened him whenever Ábel wanted to share his own enthusiasm for what he happened to be reading, and it was always with the utmost nervousness that he took a book in his hands, as if it were a highly complex, slightly mysterious object not altogether pleasant to the touch and he would only touch it in order to please his friend.

He lived with them, among them, and took no sides. He exhibited the patience of a good-hearted, high-born gentleman of leisure moving among impatient but decent courtiers, with the foggy sense that his place in relation to theirs was permanently fixed by his birth and destiny. He had a vague feeling that the gang was some inevitable part of that destiny, and as with all matters of fate the fact seemed to him both painful and ridiculous. These boys, from whom he was separated for only a few hours at a time when they were sleeping, to whom he felt bound by a power whose meaning and purpose lay beyond him, that was stronger than any other human bond, were not even particularly sympathetic to him. He wasn’t really attracted to their form of rebellion: they seemed to have chosen it by some act of incomprehensible, intangible aggression. The environment in which they lived, the disorderly order, the unknown, unbearable, disintegrating world outside had also brought him close to a state of internal rebellion, but it was a simpler, more tangible, more violent form of revolution that appealed to him. He felt fully part of everything they did: he couldn’t resist the tantalizing spell it cast with its peculiar means of protest and negation and the way it permeated all their games, a spell whose power emanated from Ábel or possibly Ernõ. His tastes though ran to less complex forms of resistance. For instance, Tibor would never have argued against a scheme whereby they set up a machine gun in front of the church and fought a battle of self-defense, and if one of them were to suggest that they should set fire to the town one windy night it would only have been the practical details that gave him food for thought.

The boys—this gang—in whose midst he suddenly happened to find himself, who seemed to have materialized around him, were not entirely what he would have chosen. He never dared confess this to anyone. He was ready to sacrifice his life to the gang because the gang would have sacrificed theirs for him. The military ethos of his father had somehow percolated through to him and exerted a certain influence. All for one and one for all. That “one” was Tibor.

He observed other groups, other gangs, with a kind of embarrassed longing, admiring the pranks of his schoolmates who, despite the yoke the world imposed on them, seemed to bear their lot lightly with wild practical jokes, fiercely competitive sports, and, above all, by giving themselves to the cult of the body. Tibor admired nothing so much as physical courage. The gang, however, violently rejected such acts of physical bravado along with all other forms of bravado that had any practical application as an entirely alien mode of being.

He couldn’t understand why he was with them. He couldn’t—he didn’t wish to—dissociate himself from them but he continued to feel that he was a guest in whose honor they had gathered together. Everything they did filled him with a sour and vengeful delight. What is to become of all this, he thought and curled his lip. But he was incapable of disengagement. He sensed that there was a latent meaning in their games, that behind the games there glimmered a world he too remembered, a fresh, just, inexpressibly exciting world out of whose splinters the gang wanted to construct something, a small bell jar under a vast sky, within which they might hide themselves and stare at the world outside through the glass, their faces bitterly contorted.

He was the only one among them who didn’t care whether the jar cracked or not, whether he would be drafted. Fear of the war? Could it be worse than the funk before exams, the humiliating concealments, the servile subterranean life they were condemned to live as things stood? War, in all likelihood, was just another form of servitude and humiliation invented by adults to torture one another and people weaker than themselves.

But he remained part of the gang because he felt that association with it protected him from the one overriding yet incomprehensible power, that of adults. Nor had he ever tested the strength of the ties that bound him to the others. They, who acted under no orders and lived in a constant state of rebellion against all sources of power, came to him gently and trusted their fates to him. Perhaps it was pity that he felt as he moved among them, pity and a touch of forgiveness and goodwill. They asked little of him—a smile, a minimal gesture of the hand, or simply his presence among them—and they would have suffered keenly if he refused them.

A
ND IT WAS ONLY IN THIS ROOM AT
T
HE
P
ECULIAR
, solely in these past few months, that he showed an occasional, faint partiality for Ábel. They were bound, barely discernibly bound, by particular hatreds they had in common, more closely bound than the other half of the gang by class, by a vague similarity between the shapes their memories assumed, their upbringing and way of life. There was something they shared that was peculiar only to them, maybe no more than that they had both been beaten as children for matters such as not holding a knife and fork in the proper manner, or for not greeting somebody properly, or for not responding properly to someone else’s greeting. Ábel was skinny, freckled, and pale ginger—there was something about his physical being, particularly about his hands, that engendered in Tibor a certain sympathy he did not feel for the others. Maybe it came down to what Ernõ had said, that wealth was not a matter of money but something else.

The sense of guilt shared by the two of them that—unlike the other two who were perhaps closer to the realities of life—they had something private going on, an advantage of a rather worthless sort but one that could not be made up, not in this life at least, by the others, established a bond between the two within the terms of the bond between the gang as a whole.

The itinerant career of Colonel Prockauer had seen him stationed in various melancholy towns, and somewhere in the recesses of his mind Tibor carried childhood memories of a range of barracks and garrisons. Lajos, the one-armed one, was rather like his father in many respects: pleasure-seeking, greedy, and violent. Tibor was sometimes astonished to note that the one-armed one, whose own childhood, like his, was restricted and spent in barrack squares, under the terrifying rule of his father, was just as drawn to the gang as he was, drawn by a longing for that irreplaceable lost “other world.” Tibor was astonished that Lajos, who had returned from the adult world with partial paralysis and with only one arm, having only a few months before set out from their shared room and a school bench, should have voluntarily re-entered their company, as one among other suffering victims wearing the ball and chain of fate. There was a nervous humility about Lajos’s manner when in the gang’s company, a humility sometimes broken by an ungovernable rush of fury.

He wanted to share in their anxieties and sometimes he too smoked in secret. He was happy to walk down narrow side streets at night in their company and, heart racing, would steal into desolate bars at the edge of town with them. He, to whom everything that one’s parents had forbidden was allowed, who was free of that complex hierarchy of superiors in which parents’ friends played as threatening a role as did teachers or military patrols, now humbly volunteered once more to share with them a fate that no longer bound him.

Some sense of incompleteness emanated from the one-armed one ever since he had returned from the front. He never talked about the front in detail or directly. Ernõ told the gang that the one-armed one was paying frequent visits to the cobbler. They would apparently talk in low voices for hours at a time. When confronted with this Lajos stuttered and tried to avoid answering by going off somewhere. The gang kept a dubious eye on these examples of backsliding whereby Lajos kept seeking out the company of adults. Lajos oscillated anxiously between the world of the gang and that of the adults. It was as if he were seeking something, an answer, some missing item he had utterly lost track of.

Béla suggested he was looking for his other arm. They waved away this ridiculous idea so Béla felt ashamed and fell silent. Surely he can’t be looking for his missing arm because he knows where that is: first it was stored in a bucket, then thrown into the lime pit. People don’t search so feverishly for trifles, Ernõ declared in a superior manner. Ábel proposed that Lajos was looking for his place in society. He couldn’t bring himself to believe that the things he so much desired—freedom and the rights and privileges of being an adult—were worth less than the gang’s form of comradeship. He was seeking something he might have missed before, something adults could not give back to him.

They spoke of adults in general rather than in particular. The word “they” was self-explanatory: it was obvious who “they” signified. They spied on them, described each other’s experiences of them, discussed possible developments. When Mr. Zádor, the bishop’s secretary, who never went anywhere without his top hat, tripped and fell into a puddle in the street it was as much a victory for them as when Judge Kikinday had a toothache and couldn’t sleep for nights on end. They made no distinctions and forgave nothing. They agreed on the principle that in a state of war any means might be employed to destroy the enemy. They never doubted, not for an instant, that the war they were fighting was quite distinct from the ones in which the adults were engaged.

Lajos was their spy. He could work behind enemy lines and render a reliable account. There were very few opportunities for a more effective assault: the enemy was armed, suspicious, and ruthless. His enormous claws were already extended towards them and would pretty soon drag them away.

T
HE ACTOR WAS FROM THE ENEMY CAMP BUT HE
did enter theirs through the window. He was an adult: he had a belly, his shaven face had a bluish tinge, he wore a watch on a chain, strange clothes, and a wig. Lajos brought him along after long negotiations and they received him in the same suspicious manner as they would an enemy.

Immediately, within the first hour, he suggested they employ the familiar
tutoyer
mode of address. This put them on their guard. The actor sat, walked, chattered, and held forth. He seemed to have a vast amount to say. He smoked their cigarettes, talked of other towns, and told smutty jokes. He discoursed on the life of the theater, and on the doings of the female members of the company, supplying names and specific details. One had to take proper note of these details as they offered insights into what the enemy might have up its sleeve.

The actor was an object of suspicion in every respect. He used terms like sea, Barcelona, steerage, Berlin, underground train, three hundred francs. The actor would say, “Then the captain came down and the blacks all leapt overboard.” All this was highly suspect. He sounded just like the sea captain they knew whom they tended to meet most afternoons in front of the theater. The actor said, “By that time I hadn’t slept for three nights and my baggage had been left in Jeumont so I was overcome by drowsiness. Suddenly the train stops, I look up, and it says, Cologne! Well, I think, Cologne. We shall have to think of something really clever now.” You could listen to stuff like this for hours. But all the time the suspicion grew that reality lay elsewhere, that this was merely the actor’s reality. It ran counter to their practice to place their pooled trust in anyone. They had learned to sense it in their pulses: when others attempted to communicate with them it was either to punish or to plead, but whatever the case it was always with an ulterior motive. It was also difficult to believe that the actor, who could after all have been sitting in the window of the coffeehouse or strolling up and down the high street with his top hat and long-stemmed pipe, possibly enjoying the attentions of chorus girls and divas, should have chosen to spend time with them arguing for hours on end without some particular aim in view.