by Peter Nadas
He could not hope to go higher or lower than this. He could not tell how much time had elapsed. It was impossible to imagine what would happen to him or where he had come from.
It must have been around noon, because for some time his hearing registered the combined sounds of the cathedral bells coming from the other side of the great river. He could not have said who had suffered defeat as the result of his victory or what sort of defeat had cast a shadow on his victory. He did not want to die, neither his body nor his mind had sufficient reasons for it; still, he did not manage to die. He did not want to return; having been reborn, he had no good reason to traipse back on the old dirt road; still, he was alive.
His sadness was stronger than his other feelings, but that is what made the feeling so uplifting.
He kept closing and opening his eyes.
How beautiful the blue of the sky.
He had been engaged to death ever since his birth, which he knew well because his mother had passed away during it, her heart had simply given out.
How could he understand that he need not feel guilty about his birth.
He filled the distant emptiness of beauty with the original darkness of his consciousness.
While his breathing did not subside, this darkness was filled with velvety red and sharply vibrating yellow images. If he wanted to be free of them he could open his eyes on the motionless blue sky, and then nothing bothered him, he was free, truly free.
He was too busy with these special feelings to notice the approaching noise.
When he first heard it far off, he assumed an animal was making it. It ceased for a long time and then recurred without sounding any closer.
By the time he raised his head, he wouldn’t have had time to jump up and disappear into the thicket unnoticed.
A strange young man was standing under the trees on the other side of the water, where Dávid had taken off his pants, shirt, and sandals. It was most peculiar that the stranger had not noticed him or his clothes. He had a whole loaf of bread under his arm; he was deeply engrossed in munching on it. Before he swallowed one mouthful, he bent down like a bird reaching under its wing with its beak and tore out the next bite with his teeth. He did this eagerly, but chewed very collectedly, his eyes roaming all the time. But he didn’t see what he was looking at. He did not notice the boy watching him from the other side. Mixing his saliva with the bread was good, swallowing was good, grinding his jaws was good, ripping the bread felt good on his teeth, the mildly salty taste was good, the crunching and the gentle fragrance were good, and every good had a shining picture.
These pictures probably blinded him. And because he so passionately strove for the good, paying no particular attention to the circumstances, his petty thievery did not cause him any moral problems. Bad was something that prevented the existence of good. The taste of sour cherries was good but the smell of bread instantly wiped away the shining pictures of this good and the picture of fragrance emanating from the tarp-covered truck became the good. He did not compare one good with the other; he did not brood over things or weigh them.
Bread was transported from the bakery in the neighboring village in airy crates. The loaves were regulation-size, pale brown and plump; knives liked to crack their crispy crust. The driver would push the high-piled crates to the edge of the truck bed and his assistant would carry them on his shoulder into the store. A large loaf cost six forints. The assistant called in sick that day, but everyone knew he had to go to Kisoroszi to hoe corn at his stern mother-in-law’s place.
That is why the truck was unguarded for a few minutes. When the driver jumped out of his vehicle, shipping bills in hand, and flung the tarp up to reach the crates, he barely glanced at the approaching youngster. While the driver was busy with the papers in the store, the youngster had no difficulty in taking a loaf out of the nearest crate. He did not move on right away; standing by the truck, he kept sniffing the pointy ends of the bread. Where should he bite into it, here or there. Where should one bite first if the bread offers two tempting ends at the same time. Finally, he did not take a bite but carefully put the loaf under his arm and took off.
And the rather delayed shouts reached him only when he was already walking slowly along the empty road.
Neither the elderly presbyter mending his fence, Jani Rácz, nor the women looking out of the store could have confused him with anyone. After all, they’d seen him eating somebody else’s sour cherries off the tree and already had wanted to shout at him then. They tarried because he was wearing the same kind of worker’s clothes that the driver’s assistant wore and even reached for the loaf with the same movement. He lifted it out as a person well within his rights, about whose pure intentions there could be no doubt. The presbyter did not believe his old eyes, as he said. He put down the hammer and seemed to be taking out of his mouth the nails he’d been holding between his lips, and then he opened his mouth wide with amazement.
It occurred to the women that the driver might have been assigned a new assistant, at least some of them claimed that later. Sometimes one thinks contrary to one’s knowledge or sensory experience. The first sound came from the old presbyter. He didn’t think it was necessary to take off after the thief, but inaction offended his sense of justice. Then the women, interrupting one another, shouted thief and swarmed out of the store. The presbyter dashed to the street, brandishing his hammer, as if to knock the thief dead on the spot, and, pointing the hammer to the other side of the street, yelled that somebody had stolen some bread. It would hurt his prestige to repeat himself. A person of consequence cannot run after a thief in plain sight of the villagers just because of a few sour cherries and a loaf of bread. As he related later, in the inn near the bridge, at the sight of such impudence he felt his feet rooted to the ground. Meanwhile the chaos in and in front of the general store grew to such proportions that it was as if, God knows, the women had been witnessing a major crime.
The baldheaded little driver, in his rakish cap with a too-small visor, did not understand what the women wanted of him.
What should he do now.
He grinned at them, showing his healthy white teeth.
At this time, Balter was sitting under the apricot tree with his head hung between his knees.
Dávid was rounding the pond for the second time.
When the driver caught on, he ran out of the store along with the shouting women, but by then the thief not only was far away but, because he sensed something bad in the shouts, had finally broken into a run, taking his bread with him.
The main square led to the end of the village, which was bare, not a forest, not an orchard, not a bush anywhere; he could not disappear into empty pasture. He made the choice a pursued animal would make: he jumped into the roadside ditch and made his way thence to a lower-lying dirt road.
The driver could have either run after him or, jumping into the truck, caught up with him on the dirt road, producing enormous clouds of dust, probably. He waved dismissively with the shipping bills in his hand. Later, by way of explanation, he said he didn’t have time for things like that; he had to deliver fresh bread to six stores in four villages within two hours.
That is how a moment in which many other things might have been decided came to an end.
Later Dávid did not dare move, even though there was nothing frightening about the stranger. He saw him as both gentle and wild.
Yet he felt as if he had been caught doing something wrong. As if people were saying, well, well, you’re up to something terribly bad and are rotten to the core. It was as if he discovered in the fugitive’s face the pitiful guilelessness of his own life thus far.
That is when, at Vác, the pastor stepped onto the ferry ready to depart.
And Dávid was frightened not so much by the possibility that the stranger might have observed him but by his being the one doing the watching and observing of an unsuspecting stranger. He wanted to shout something, a friendly greeting. As is usual in such cases, no sound issued fr
om his throat.
And that reminded him of his negligence, the bell-ringing.
Thanks to his objectivity, by the way, he was the only one not taken in by the fugitive’s appearance. Twenty-five years old, he later told the police without thinking, and he was off by only a few months.
He jumped up to run away; perhaps the stranger wouldn’t notice him doing that. The food stopped moving in his mouth and, as if he had come upon tastier loot, he stepped with his booted feet on Dávid’s clothes. In the bubble in which the good ruled exclusively, something happened that the adolescent boy, upset by his own negligence, could not comprehend. The fugitive put the loaf with its chewed-off end on the ground, plopped down next to it, tugging and yanking at his ankle boots until he’d pulled them off his feet, and then threw both of them into the water. What Dávid understood from the nature of these movements was that the fugitive was struggling not with his boots but with the devil and wanted to be free of it, and he tried to explain this to the police officers. The first boot had barely filled with water when the second one followed, and they both sank at about the same time.
According to the records the young man was a patient incapable of controlling or taking care of himself. If, using drugs, they tried to make him see reason, he became aware only of the bad. This was not his first escape. When he was taken back to the institution, things would still be bad but no one would have trouble with him for a long time, and thus he managed each time to allay suspicion. He hardly ever talked or made a sound, and he did not hear many sounds either; he either sat or lay on his bed. If they did not tie him down, he might spend an entire day getting dressed and undressed. Whenever he could, he stole other people’s clothes to put on instead of his own. And to keep other inmates from beating him up for his thievery, the attendants preferred to tie him up. When unable to get dressed and undressed, he felt as if he were crouching at the bottom of a deep pit. The pit was narrow; he could not stretch out his arms in it. Up above the sun did not shine, the wind did not blow, no snow fell, and there was no rain in the world, but it was somewhat lighter than down here at the bottom of the pit.
Water dripped from the thick clay walls. Frogs, worms, and all sorts of reptiles lived with him at the wet bottom of the pit. An impassive observer might claim that he was wearing his institutional pajamas, but he had to protect his skin from the slippery creatures; his skin hurt, it hurt everywhere, and he also had to be sure that none of these creatures managed to nestle in some part of his body. He made movements as if only the instinct of self-defense had left any memories in his mind. Still, sometimes snakes, spiders, or lizards crawled into his ears or through his nostrils into his brain. They penetrated his mouth and his rectum, and then, he felt, they multiplied. The attendants did not help; he asked them in vain, pleading with them quietly. If very rarely he managed to cough up, vomit, blow out, or evacuate the evil vermin, right away they crawled back in somewhere else.
And when the situation became untenable, when so much bad could not exist without a tiny bit of good, then the desire to be naked, so necessary for his body’s defense, endowed his limbs with a power whose strength was at least as terrible as the pain of his defenseless nakedness had been.
At such times either they trapped him and pumped him with a bigger dose of sedative than usual, or he managed to climb out of the slippery pit unnoticed and leave unnoticed.
If someone had observed Dávid repeatedly circling the pond, keeping to his ever-deepening and quickly fading footprints, in the end raising squelching clumps of clay with his feet to the point of exhaustion, that person could not have said to what temptation the boy was surrendering himself. We can know so little about one another. And Dávid could not have said why the stranger had thrown his boots into the water, why, jumping up from his sitting position, he seemed to be compelled to shed his skin, why he tore off his blue worker’s shirt, why he shoved his pants down to his ankles, why he hopped around, stumbling like that, why he stepped out of them, and then why, once he was naked, the vehement resistance in him subsided.
Underneath the blindingly pale skin, his bare frame showed clearly, pivoting on its joints.
The sight made Dávid forget his negligence; his fear, his aggressive mood, his self-accusation and anger all got stuck in his throat like a piece of bread gone the wrong way. The stranger crouched, keeping his knees together, and, wobbling as he sought his balance, first pulled to himself his worker’s shirt and then his pants. He did this with movements as engrossingly slow and thoughtful as those of a person intent on smoothing out his clothes and laying them on the back of a chair before going to bed. First he fixed the pants. Laying them out before him, he pulled out and straightened the legs. Then he laid the shirt on top of the pants and patted it, and then, not moving from his place, he reached back behind him with one thin arm, scooped up the bread, and rolled it into the clothes. With the bundle in his hand, he stood up.
He could not have been blind, and if he wasn’t he surely saw Dávid on the far shore of the water.
He heaved the bundle over his head, the way we get ready to heave a heavy stone. At the end of a second preparatory swing, he hurled it with all the might of his tense body.
A big dull splash followed, and Dávid involuntarily cried out.
They were about twenty-five meters from each other. At Dávid’s shout, which might even have preceded the splash, their eyes met for the first time. Like two heavy oil stains seeking each other, neither surprise nor excitement disturbed the way their glances blended. The bundle popped to the surface, and while in each other’s attentive eyes they were paying attention to the attentiveness, the shirt and pants floated apart, scattering quickly bursting bubbles around them.
Shirt and pants peeled off each other and lazily, with slow-moving tentacles, sank again.
The bread stayed on the surface for a time.
Even later Dávid could not describe to his grandfather every detail of this strange series of events. With his words, he rearranged the story’s chronology to create the impression that he had neglected ringing the church bell because of a heated battle for the pants and shirt, and therefore that slapping his face had been unfair. With this bold lie he was protecting his secret, which he could not reveal because he had no words with which to share it. And while he hurried behind his agitated grandfather on the shady brick pavement that encircled the house, his grandfather’s blind anger filled him with new and ominous feelings. About the old man being after some sort of bloody revenge, when it was Dávid’s lies that had befogged his judgment.
They both longed for a scapegoat and each of them found one.
He knew exactly what his grandfather wanted to do: to get on his bicycle and, disregarding the spasms of his kidney trouble, ride out to the fields.
There to catch that lunatic by the ear and, if necessary, with a single blow to render him harmless, or to turn him over to the police and take back the pants.
He would never again dare return to that place, which, judging by what had been done to him, was obviously cursed.
But he figured incorrectly, because the pastor was thinking not about the tramp, of whose existence he could not know, but about the retired prison guard who, according to the villagers, spent his days walking around naked on his land.
As it turned out, he did not believe them.
Grandpapa, he whimpered in his agony, in a whiny child’s voice he hadn’t used in years, it’s just a lunatic, he whined as they hurried along the sidewalk.
He wanted to arrest the flow of events—though he also longed for revenge—so that he wouldn’t have to divulge his pagan secrets or admit to lies.
He threw in his own boots and his clothes too, believe me, and probably that’s why he needed my pants. With words like this he tried to get out of his story. He is a madman, believe me, Grandpa, he even threw his bread in the water, he escaped from somewhere.
Mention of the bread caught his grandfather’s attention.
One must be truly
a madman or criminal to throw away bread, he thought, but his thick, muscular back did not respond even when he crossed the high threshold of the shed door; reason could not assuage his agitation so quickly. Grabbing the bicycle by its handlebars and seat, with a single motion he lifted it out of the clutter of tools and turned around with it; spades and hoes, shovels and pickaxes thudded and knocked together in the wake of his violent movement.
Dávid stood in the bright opening of the door; the pastor’s wire-rimmed glasses flashed at him sternly from the dimness inside.
Where are your shoes, he asked the boy because he needed time to divert himself from his original goal.
Dávid looked down at his bare feet as if only now discovering the missing sandals; with this, he too meant to gain time, to thwart his grandfather’s revenge.
He didn’t take them. They’re still there.
Which shoes did you have on, the pastor asked sternly.
I wore my sandals today, the boy hastened with the answer.
The pastor rebuked himself unsparingly. Which increased his agitation instead of lessening it. Anyone who at the sight or sound of the slightest trouble lets his mind jump to the most extreme conclusion must face his own criminal character. Nature had endowed the pastor with enormous physical strength, which forced him to be careful with his temper, not to lose it, to nip it in the bud. This habit was not, in the end, alien to his gentle disposition, but it filled him with complacency, and thus did his moral precaution lead him toward the greatest danger lying in wait for him: arrogance. When he yielded to the temptation of complacency, as he frequently did, he committed the mortal sin of arrogance.
He seemed more like a shy man than a stupid one.
With the benefit of his long spiritual experience, he reproached himself most severely; he prayed fervently. But a single remark offending decency, or cursing or swearing or an obscene gesture, sufficed to upset the fastidiously guarded equilibrium of his conscience.