by Peter Nadas
Balter broke out in a sweat, but nothing happened during the early morning crossing, and the ferrymen certainly did not ask him anything. Later, shrugging their shoulders, they said they had figured he’d been called in to his former workplace. He probably could use a supplement to his pension. As soon as he stepped off the ferry, he removed his jacket and with a youthful motion threw it over his shoulder. He walked up the paved shore like that. There was no one on the street that led him back to the prison.
The single opening in the endless, ancient, three-story-high stone wall was a small steel door. For security reasons, the former driveway had been walled off sometime in the 1950s, but the nicely carved baroque frame of the main gate was left in the wall. He would have thought it improper to show up with the jacket over his shoulder. He put it on at the personnel entrance before he rang the bell. Shortly, an eye appeared in the peephole and the door opened invitingly.
The prison guards, his former pals, received Balter with frenzied enthusiasm. Their riotous shouting lured more of them out of the building and into the guardroom; they all touched him, patted him on the back, laughing, bantering, and he naturally did not respond. The men found nothing unusual about this since they had never known him to be talkative. They pushed him onto a chair, and he, seeing the joy of so many strong men, smiled gently.
Suddenly he remembered something he found funny enough to tell as a little joke.
Is that female rat still coming around, he asked them.
He turned very quietly to them with this question, which magnified its effect. They marveled at him, as at some sage who sooner or later will touch on the main point. This was an offhand remark made among guards, convicts serving severe sentences, and newly arrived prisoners.
Of course they didn’t talk about it in regular conversations. Real men don’t talk about matters of the heart. Only a few words, whispered through clenched teeth, and the terrifying thought would begin to take root in the minds of new prisoners.
Don’t take it hard, partner, thus the old boys to newly arrived ones, at least we have rats here.
This was a team game that sometimes even a rat could not avoid. The prison guards with their dogs were meant to catch rats alive, or they’d help in the hunt, which is no mean entertainment and—the most important thing—not without danger.
It was something they had to do, anyway, when the rats grew too numerous in the food depot or came over en masse in the drainpipes from the bishop’s palace, helped by a high water level.
Once we had a braggart here who could take it for twenty years. He didn’t want to go for the pitcher, you see, but he did get to like one of them good-looking females.
You won’t believe it, goddamn it, but there’s always a meek one among them who gets hooked on it.
All you’ve got to tell a newly arrived convict in the dark is that if she comes just shove it in and let her have it.
Sleep eventually overcomes the terrible dreams on those first nights, and when that happens, in with the rat under the cover.
When the guffawing died down, all he said was that he killed him.
They could not stop their wild laughter right away since they did not know this new version of the prank. But they did know that Balter and his wife had been living in a murderous relationship all their lives, in other words that they had a bad marriage.
Now they saw the strange yellow mud that was stuck to his shoes, saw that his suit hung loosely on his frighteningly scraggy body.
All he wanted from them was to call the warden.
They remained quiet, no one dared do this since none of them saw any reason for or sense in doing it.
Once in a while one lets his wife have a good one, or even beats her up. The next day, or a week later, they make up with a lot of tears and promises, and that’s when women screw best.
While they were thinking about this, they had to notice the hitherto unfamiliar smile on Balter’s suspiciously dirty and unshaven face; until then they had seen that kind of gentleness only on the faces of strangers.
He reached into his pocket for his house key and put it on the table. The telephone was right there on the guardroom table, but it did not occur to anyone to take steps while Balter was sitting there.
They were quiet, looking at him, afraid even to light up. After a while it became impossible not to believe he had killed somebody.
But a long time passed before one of them finally left the room.
From that moment on he answered all their questions from behind his kindly smile.
When the guard came back and stopped by the door, prepared to take him to the warden, Balter readily followed him.
The Lover of Her Beauty
The expensive things strewn on the floor, the brand-new work clothes missing from the hook, and the fine yellow leather shoes kicked to where the stinking ankle boots used to be caused no small headache for the Gypsies. Never in their lives had they seen such yellow leather shoes.
How did they get here; who made Tuba’s work boots disappear.
Nevertheless they went back to work.
Although not everything was in perfect order they could not stop. If only because the tar was melting, boiling, bubbling in the cauldron, and they were being paid by area of repairs completed.
The sun was high in the cloudless sky; the big machine was puffing.
Usually they did not talk while working, but their silence now became bitter and agitated. They were also affected by the beer they’d drunk at the nearby roadside food stall, as if at a friendly celebration, in the company of their Hungarian foreman, an older man named Bizsók.
The work team had five members.
A kid named Jakab stoked the fire of the machine; he also handled the cauldron’s feeder. He was a tall, puny young man, still an adolescent. The stubble above his overly thick lips and on his round, childlike chin was more like fuzz; on his well-shaped shiny skull one could see that it was no barber who had sheared him so mercilessly. One fine early morning he’d awakened to find his limbs tied to the bed while a pair of scissors went snipping around his head. In vain he shouted and implored them to let him go; in vain he yanked at the straps as hard as he could, which was not very hard, or hurled terrible curses at the men. They told him, stop jumping around unless you want scabs on your pretty mug. They lathered his head and shaved it smooth.
He let them work the razor; he was afraid, trembling, he endured it, sniveling; not very manly of him, but he cried.
Now his large dark eyes were again filling with so many glistening tears that he could barely see what he had to do. Two men pushed their metal wheelbarrows under the feeder. The iron sizzled and sputtered as the boiling tar flowed into the barrow, the hub creaked and grated under the hot weight.
The two men with the wheelbarrows were brothers, both of them mature men with families; they resembled each other too—skinny, hairless, black, and small. Muscles hardened into knots kept their backs curved even when they were not wheeling their barrows. They wore cotton work pants, long faded from too much light and too much washing, asbestos gloves on their hands, and wood-soled clogs on their feet. One was László, the other Imre, but nobody called them by their first names. If somebody asked for Téglás, everyone knew the caller was referring to Imre, the younger brother, since the older one hardly ever said anything and one could not talk to him as to a human being. But Imre talked a lot, quickly and enthusiastically, so there was no point in addressing the other brother, not even by his family name. He acted as if he were mute, yet he enjoyed laughing at things and one could tell from the roguish squints in his eyes that he knew what was what. As small children they had slept by their father’s side, curled into each other. As part of the world’s natural order the smaller boy nestles into the lap of the bigger one. The smallest boy was always pressed closest to the father, clinging to the large body with his tiny hands, and the other boys, in order of birth, curled into one another. Their mother and sisters were available to the boys only in
the light of day; this was the strict moral code. But where was the mud-walled, sod-lined shanty, half dug into the ground, with its handsome, carefully built little oven and the always spick-and-span cooking plate. How many years ago did their parents die. Nevertheless the strict law of birth succession still ruled the boys’ relationships. Death too they could imagine only as they did the red-hot, empty cooking plate when there was nothing to cook.
Whatever laughing László did, crackbrained Imre did as well; he couldn’t help it. But if Imre, head and arms flying in all directions, began to pour out all those superfluous words, László would accompany the many sentences with the lazy nod of an experienced man. The truth of the younger brother was reinforced by the prestige of the older. Bizsók also noticed that the older brother never questioned the younger one’s word when they were around Hungarians; at most he’d busy himself with something else.
Perhaps it was only that eternally valid difference in the depths of their souls that made their furrowed faces slightly different.
In a state of constant readiness, his eyes wide, Imre concentrated on what the right thing was to say, while the older Téglás brother knew what they should do.
They ran as they pushed the wheelbarrows heavy with the hot molten material, and then they emptied them with a single quick lift, neatly tipping them over; sizzling and sputtering, the tar oozing out in front of Tuba, who with wide leisurely strokes of his very heavy leveling blade smoothed out any lumps in the hot mass, kneeling then squatting then kneeling again. He worked with incredible elegance and absolute inner discipline. The fifth man on the team, Bizsók, was both their mechanic and their supervisor. Sometimes he would check with his level and other instruments on a half-finished job when it was still possible to make corrections if need be, but the judgment of Tuba’s eyes seldom disappointed him. This Bizsók was the oldest and, by the nature of things, most consequential member of the team. The Gypsies idolized him for his fairness, though they had his weak points pegged as well. Sometimes among themselves they would contemptuously call him dumb peasant. Because it was not his work, not even his nice family, but his apple orchard that meant everything to him. He’d hardly have gotten home from work after a long train ride when he’d head straight for his orchard; he never stopped working. The Gypsies considered him a wastrel, a man who’d wasted his life for the sake of unpredictable profits. If the road construction company, which covered half the country, hadn’t urgently needed every skilled hand it could get, and if Bizsók hadn’t had the sense of duty he had, he could have retired, but as an old-fashioned man he considered the world’s anonymous needs as a law governing his personal life.
He kept at both his job and his apple orchard for the same reason, though he couldn’t have expressed in words what his compulsion was.
And the Gypsies certainly couldn’t have told him what to do differently.
Since both his grown sons had built their own houses, many different jobs awaited him, and him alone, in his enormous bountiful orchard. Occasionally he even helped his foster daughter, though because of her foreign blood he was a little afraid of her. Bizsók was rational and somewhat reserved, a man whose circumstances had taught him sensible husbandry, so he created order for himself out of whatever was at his disposal. He came from one of the most deprived areas of the Alföld, but he’d never thought of himself as poor among the truly poor. He couldn’t, in any case, because a man in a Tiszahát-region village with two threshing machines to his name was considered a rich man in those days. He had inherited one machine from his father before the war, the other he received when he came home from a POW camp, from the bequest of a Jewish thresher who had perished in the war. It did not take long before both machines were taken away from him, and thereafter he had lived away from his family.
He left because he couldn’t swallow the insult of being ordered about at the collective farm’s machine and tractor station by his former day laborers, the very men who’d been responsible for taking his expensive threshing machines away from him.
Sitting in the high saddle of the steamroller, his arms resting on the steering wheel, he watched his men from behind his thick glasses. These round spectacles were surely a peculiar old item. The ravages of time had turned the translucent frame yellow, and it seemed to have become organically fused with the dark, sunburned cushions of his fleshy face. A battery may run down, an axle may wear out, the cohesive tension in the molecules of artificial materials may diminish, but he had a hard time giving up his longing for eternity even when it concerned only a pair of glasses. Not for himself, not for his family, but on the roads and in his apple orchard he worked for eternity, or at least against mortality.
For years this reasonable and experienced man had been conducting a quiet battle against the natural fate of his glasses. He could not have cherished his own life more; as a soldier and a prisoner of war he’d learned not to value life too much, but he treated his glasses with a circumspect caution bordering on madness that he never accorded himself or others.
The best place for his glasses was on the wide bridge of his slightly flattened nose, where he could nourish its material, in the perishing cold of winter and in the heat of summer, with the warmth of his skin and the fine grease of his perspiring pores. He never removed his glasses unnecessarily. Not even when walking from the cold air into a warm place, which fogged up the lenses. He owned something he could protect only by touching it as rarely as possible. He was content with his fate too, as long as he didn’t think about it.
István Bizsók was the full name of the man with the glasses.
The road builders hauled two gray trailers with them to their jobs; they never built a new road, only repaired existing ones, doing their share to keep the old highways in working order. Among themselves they called one trailer the office because under the barred window was a small table covered with wrapping paper on which Bizsók kept drawings of road sections to be repaired, plans and accounts relating to the expected materials to be used, warehouse receipt-books, work logs, workers’ time sheets, a ruler, a few pencils, and an eraser, but nothing else. Empty pay envelopes were kept in the drawer, which had a working lock. Next to the door stood the stove on which they cooked supper in the fall and early spring months or on rainy summer days.
In the dim far end of the trailer Bizsók had his bed, which was considered comfortable. The second trailer served as quarters for the four Gypsies.
Sometimes they set up the two trailers perpendicularly to each other, creating a small courtyard, and sometimes they had the trailers parallel and facing, making a small street for their communal life.
They picked carefully the locations where they settled. What sorts of folk lived in the area, were their dogs wild, what was close to them, what was farther away. Gypsies from the Alföld traditionally did not consider peasants as human and they feared them as they did wild animals. But Tuba came from Transdanubia, from the boundary region on the shores of the Mura river, and things were different with him; he also behaved differently with Hungarians. He knew ethnic Croatians, Serbs, and Slavs, and he claimed they were even wilder and crueler than Hungarians. Because a Hungarian, when he’s alone, is a coward, but these others are wild even when they have no help from anywhere. Bizsók had to be on guard to see that the locals did not blame the Gypsies when something went missing. They had to know the directions the wind blew, where there was water, where the nearest well was. For some time now he had been relying on Tuba’s judgment to answer these questions. János Tuba was the first Gypsy to be hired on this work team; other Gypsies then joined up as Hungarian workers slowly left the company. Later, Bizsók brought in the Téglás brothers and in turn they brought their hapless sister’s son, poor little Jakab, who had been with them for only a few weeks.
Hungarians did not work at such hard and ill-paid jobs.
When Tuba joined the team, he had scarcely been older than Jakab was now. The other men hadn’t wanted a Gypsy on their team for anything in the w
orld, but because of his appearance and behavior they just swallowed hard. They did not even discuss among themselves whether they should say no to Bizsók’s choice. As things turned out, Bizsók made an effort to get to know these Gypsies, but he did not really succeed. And he couldn’t even be absolutely sure that his foster daughter, Gyöngyvér Mózes, for whom, at his wife’s urging, he might buy an apartment in Budapest, was not a Gypsy herself. She sang nicely, and it was probably her blood that drove her into the arms of so many different men. Even if she did not bring every one of them home with her. They had found out, or heard, that Ágost Lippay was no longer with her; he’d run away from her while they were abroad somewhere, and now she was with some poet who had helped her to get radio work. In time, Bizsók realized that every Gypsy was different.
But he did not know what to do with this realization of his.
Actually he should have; after all, he had been together with Gypsies in the POW camp. Whether or not she was a Gypsy, he balked at buying the apartment, yet he could not say no to this little woman.
The Gypsies had customs he did not comprehend but instinctively felt it was best not to pry into.
They had heard Gyöngyvér sing on the radio twice, on Sunday mornings, old folk songs, accompanied on original instruments. She bent and stretched her voice and made it tremble. Bizsók did not like it at all.
He liked Vera Jákó more; she sang regular Hungarian songs.
And then there was this Jakab whom the others had sheared bald for some reason.
Bizsók heard what they were doing, saw that the boy’s curls were gone, but he did not interfere.
They’re young, that’s the time for foolishness.
When the giant Tuba joined them one summer, in the great heat Bizsók ordered the men to park the two trailers in the shade of a gigantic, solitary tree. Tuba had just mustered out of the army, along with a friend who was with him and who also was a well-built strapping lad, probably not a Gypsy.