The Rebels

by Sándor Márai

  The hoard grew and grew. Everything was shoved into Tibor’s room for the time being. It was only the arrival of the bicycle that rendered the space too narrow. The Prockauers lived in a single-story building, and one could only get into the boy’s room by passing through the room where his sick mother lay. The situation was rendered slightly less problematic by the fact that the windows in his room opened onto the yard, so the heavier and more awkward articles could be passed through the window. The window was also useful as a means of entrance and departure though someone usually had to be posted to engage the mother’s attention. The person most frequently entrusted with that task was Ernõ, who would sit with hands clasped by the woman’s bedside, his hat on his knees, his eyes fixed on the ground, while the traffic continued in and out of Tibor’s window.

  It was hardly possible to move now in either Tibor’s or Lajos’s room. The purloined objects covered the table, the top of the cupboard, and the beds. The gang had started competing with one another. Ábel had brought his father’s pliers and pincers, an old camera, and parts of his aunt’s girlhood trousseau whose lilac ribbons and yellowed papyrus colors spoke eloquently of the expectations of an unrequired maidenhead. Out of sheer good manners Tibor attempted to match Ábel’s offering with a complete set of his father’s riding gear. Useful household items began migrating from one home to another, swapping places. This was all just a game for now, a test of skill and courage. Tibor would wake some nights with sweat pouring off him to gaze astounded at the crowded room: he dreamt his father had arrived home unexpectedly and ordered him to account for the bicycle, the canvas tailcoat, the medical pliers and pincers. It was Béla alone who, having stolen money, faced a more pressing danger. It wouldn’t have counted for much that he never spent it.

  They decided to seek a proper repository for their loot. Ábel’s aunt, for all her credulity and infinite patience, did nevertheless notice the saddle and full set of equine apparatus in his room. The colonel’s wife started feeling better that fall and talked of rising from her bed. There was no immediate danger since at the beginning of every season Mrs. Prockauer tended to forewarn the world of her imminent emergence, predicting that she would soon be up and walking, but nothing had come of it in all these years. One fall afternoon they hired a cab and drove out to The Peculiar. They dined at the inn. The one-armed one set off to explore the house with the result that he discovered some rooms-to-let in the mezzanine.

  The Peculiar was built on a gentle slope, a half hour’s coach ride from town, in the middle of a partially cleared forest. Behind it loomed a dense bristling wall of pines, with the bare crags of the mountain rising to a peak above it, a peak whose glittering cap of snow might make anyone think they were in the Alps. The place had once been a spa, and a few empty neglected buildings, which used to be popular with the local bourgeoisie in the summer at the end of the last century, were ranged round the inn. Ábel had a faint memory of how, a very long time ago, in the early years of his childhood when his mother was still alive, they had vacationed here in August. A bitter, sulfurous water still bubbled from the spring. The long tobacco-smelling dining room of the inn with its pendulous oil-burning chandeliers, the ceiling decorated with old boughs, reminded him of the so-called Anna Balls, named after the ball first given in his daughter’s honor by one János Szentgyörgyi Horváth back in 1825. Along the floor, where it met the walls, dry rot fungus grew in luxuriant forms. When the weather was very hot some summers, groups of picnickers might find their way here. The inn itself was still approached through a mass of tipped-up tables on white gravel in a garden with a few straggling trees, surrounded by rotten stakes that served to support empty tin lantern casings. Glass domes prevented wind blowing the candles out on the tables. The place was sticky with damp and neglect, a neglect that seemed to symbolize the human condition at large.

  “No,” said the man, “no one comes here in the fall.”

  He was elderly, with a Slavonic accent, and had been struggling to maintain the property that he had acquired decades ago at an auction and was now stuck with. He told them that a few years ago, in peacetime, which they wouldn’t be able to remember, couples from town used to make excursions here. The happy memory of once playing mild Cupid to a generation of genteel lovers flickered across his tired, careworn face. That was when he had fitted out the three guest rooms upstairs. This gay, salacious period came to an end with the outbreak of war. Nowadays, it seemed, couples no longer thought it necessary to avoid the public gaze. The rooms had stood empty for years. There was nothing to stop them installing a couple of iron stoves there. He and his wife spent the whole winter here.

  The gang hemmed and hawed. Should they or shouldn’t they, they wondered as they chewed their tasteless salami and Liptauer, sipped at their beers, and silently pondered the idea. The one-armed one stuttered and offered arguments but they ignored him. Ábel was lightly aware of his heart beating. Without having exchanged a word on the subject they felt they had come to a turning point. Taken aback by the idea, Béla spoke with his mouth full, “Well, well, friend…” They were all preoccupied by the thought of a hiding place, regretting they hadn’t discovered one before. Had they done so earlier, having one would have prevented them sneaking about and relieved them of the constant sense of shame. They proceeded silently up the rotting wooden stairs, in single file. Years of unattended rubbish and gloom had gathered in the room. The windows opened onto the pine forest. The beds lay bare, without sheet or blanket, as if glued to the walls that were themselves hung with cobwebs. Mice had clearly been busy at their work of destruction. The tabletop was covered in mouse droppings.

  “Wonderful!” cried the one-armed one. “No one could possibly live here now!”

  Using his thumb and forefinger he carefully lifted a woman’s comb from the dust on one of the bedside tables. The filthy object suggested something lascivious, the lost illusions of a long-forgotten affair. They examined it, bright-eyed. The notion that no one could live here now allowed them to consider the room as their own.

  It was Béla who struck the deal for two rooms. The following week they made the most thoroughgoing preparations for the move. The proprietor thought the young gentlemen were after a location for various discreet rendezvous. By the end of the first week he had to admit he was disappointed in that hope. There were daily deliveries, the arrival of the bicycle signaling the end of all the comings and goings. Every day it was a different young man with a knapsack full of peculiar hard-to-explain items. Had he not known that he was dealing with students he might have felt rather uneasy. But seeing it was the son of Colonel Prockauer and his school friends what was there to worry about? Each arrival vanished into one of the rooms, locked the door, and spent a long time in there fiddling with things. After they had gone the proprietor would carefully creep in and take a look, but a few strange items of dress, the great globe, and those harmless books suggested no cause for alarm.

  The gang relaxed its ideals regarding uselessness. The knowledge that they had their own, and to a large degree independent, hiding place, a space they could do what they liked with, a room they could safely lock, slowly intoxicated even the most sober of them. They spent entire afternoons in their foul-smelling lair by the sweating iron stove, swimming in demonic cigarette smoke, arguing, making up pointless games, and refining their rules. This was the time of proper games. It was a second childhood, guiltier than the first but less restrained, more exciting, more sweet.

  They would arrive as soon as they could in the winter afternoon, immediately after lunch. The bicycle was used by whosever turn it was to arrive first and light the stove. By this time they had supplies of tea, rum, brandy, and tobacco. The smell of rum saturated the walls of the airless room, and according to Ábel anyone who came in would think he was in a ship’s cabin. All cabins smelled of rum, Ábel insisted. The saddle lay on the bed, with the hunting rifle next to it, and a visitor was more likely to think that he had entered the lair of a criminal on the run, and
that the fugitive occupant was resting his exhausted limbs somewhere while his hard-driven horse was ambling about in the snow. The hideaway served all their purposes. It offered a shelter unknown to fathers, teachers, and the powers-that-be. It was somewhere real life could finally begin. That life resembled nothing they had hitherto known. It wasn’t like their fathers’ lives, lives that did not appeal to them in the least. Here they could discuss whatever remained unfinished or unexplored. Here the discipline that governed every aspect of their childhood lives could no longer threaten or haunt them.

  They had long ago stopped being children, but here, in this room, they discovered that they dared to do what would have shamed them in town, even in front of each other, that, somewhat shyly, they could continue playing at childhood, indulging a part of themselves that could never properly be developed in childhood, a part they still retained. It was only from this vantage point that they could clearly see the adult world as it was and discuss their experiences of it. The one-armed one entered this game with real passion. His nervous stuttering laughter grew more relaxed here. This bolt-hole in The Peculiar was the only place where, occasionally, even Ernõ could be seen laughing.

  THIS WAS WHERE THEY GOT TO KNOW EACH other. The secret and secure comradeship that had separated them from the rest of town gave them an opportunity to explore each other’s characters in ways they hadn’t tried before. Everyone had to tell “everything that had happened.” It was self-evidently the case that this “everything that had happened” referred only to the time they had spent under the watchful eyes of their parents. It slowly became clear to them that it was no coincidence that had brought them together like this.

  They arranged “afternoons of fear.” Everyone had to reveal what it was they had been most afraid of “in the early days.” In this way they discovered that each of them had something they had not hitherto shared. These “fears” were located in the misty past, at some uncertain distance in time. One such afternoon when it had grown dark and they were squatting in a circle round the dying stove, the one-armed one said the time when he was most afraid was not in the flickering light of the field hospital, on the operating table, but when, at the age of seven, through the glass door of the verandah, he saw his father looming over his mother, the pair of them wrestling, until his mother used both her hands to push his face away and ran off into her room. He had felt so scared at that moment he thought he was going to die. As soon as he had said this he started stuttering again and had a spell of nervous hiccups. In the meantime Béla, who was sitting in the window watching the light reflected off the snow, tried to collect his own feelings.

  “Being afraid is good,” he said.

  It was a painful process trying to explain what he understood by the “pleasure” of fear. Tentatively, over several weeks, he had tried to analyze the roots of his own fear while the others were looking for ways to communicate with each other. Once he discovered that he could not get beyond a certain embarrassing point in his life, he stopped in shock and fell silent. Ábel and Ernõ subjected him to a strict cross-examination.

  “I am ashamed of it,” he confessed in pain.

  He was given two days to collect himself. It was strange that he who had been so excitably lewd and foul-mouthed so far had now to defend his peculiar modesty. The gang was all the more surprised by this sudden shyness regarding his memory, especially since, as it turned out after extended interrogation, there was nothing salacious in it. It was more comical than anything but it was only after a prolonged period of agonizing that he could bring himself to tell them.

  We were living on the ground floor then, he started, perspiring and red in the face. Turn your faces away!

  It was as if that had been the most trying part of the narrative, for now he spoke in a fever, rapidly, telling them how the end of the ground-floor passage opened onto the neighbor’s garden. Béla had been a timid child with a strict upbringing who even at the age of six would be so alarmed by harsh words that he wet his pants. Whenever this happened he would dry his trousers but would bundle up his underwear and throw the incriminating evidence into the neighbor’s garden. He had disposed of eight pairs of underpants that way. The expectation that his deeds would be discovered and that he would be humiliated and punished brought him to such a pitch of anxiety that he would suffer even more such childhood accidents. And once he actually was discovered and his father had given him a sound thrashing, he felt such a wave of relief flooding through him, such a sense of happiness and well-being, as he had never felt before.

  Please understand, he croaked out as quickly as he could, that being afraid was a pleasure. I had calculated what my punishment would be and anticipated it. I learned to calculate it over a period. I knew what it was that would get me a box on the ear, what resulted in a beating, what in being made to go hungry: all that was calculable. It was dreadful living in anticipation of what was to come, but once it came it felt good.

  ERNÕ SPOKE UP EVENTUALLY.

  You know my father, he said. It took him a long time to become the buffoon he is now. He even learned to read late, only once he had grown up. He read just two books, the Bible and a cheap old eighteenth-century reference work, The Little Threefold Mirror, that everyone knew. I’m not ashamed of him, but then you know nothing about our relationship. He’s right when he talks about the division of wealth. Wealth does not consist of having money. It’s something quite different. I shall never possess it, while you—every one of you—has had it from the moment you were born.

  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.

  THE WHITE TAILCOAT FITTED TIBOR 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.