There disappointment awaited him. He was expecting a seething crowd, such as he had seen at extraordinary general meetings of journalists, when a chairman was dismissed in an explosive atmosphere, but during that lull in the evening’s entertainment, between two and three in the morning, when the diners had gone and the dawn revelers had not yet appeared, the place was deserted, and just a couple of waiters were sauntering about putting knives and forks on the freshly laid tables. The colleagues had not come. No one had come. Pál looked around in dismay. He blinked. Such wretched people didn’t deserve to have anything done for them.
“Hungary,” he sighed. “Journalists’ widows, their poor little orphans,” and he ushered his friends to a table.
He ordered korhelyleves. The others wanted nothing more to eat or drink.
Pál looked at his soup, did not taste it, but stirred it for a long time before tipping into it the entire contents of the salt cellar, the paprika pot, and the jar of toothpicks. He began to eat. The toothpicks crunched between his teeth.
All three of his companions jumped up.
“This is terrible,” Skultéty was appalled, “terrible.” He looked at himself in a mirror; he had gone green, and a twitching, bitter grin trickled from his face like vinegar.
“Terrible.”
“Let’s do something,” said Esti. “This is awful.”
Pál spat the toothpicks back out into his bowl. He could not chew them.
Gergely, who was fitting a fresh light Media into his cigar holder, and Skultéty made for the telephone booth which was by the table. They did not telephone, merely lamented: Poor fellow, poor fellow.
A couple of moments later Gergely burst out of the telephone booth, his hair in disorder. He rushed straight over to Pál.
“The swine!” he shouted, beside himself with rage. “The swine!”
Pál went on sitting there, oafishly unmoved.
“Hey, Pál,” said Gergely, shaking his arm as if to wake him, “mental patients are being beaten up.”
“Where?” said Pál from the depths of his torpor, and the muscles of his face twitched.
“At St. Miklós, of course. They’ve just been on the phone. Two mental patients have been beaten up in the night.”
“It’s a scandal!” exclaimed Skultéty. “A national scandal!”
“It’s a scoop,” said Pál. “Pay the bill,” and as a soldier who hears a word of command in his sleep springs to his feet, he remembered his journalistic duty, his role as a guardian of enlightenment, at the command of humanity. “Don’t put the paper to bed yet,” he ordered. “I’ll want ten columns. And give me another cigarette.”
Esti felt that the time was ripe for him to be off. He couldn’t stand any more. He hated tricks. He was even disgusted at himself. He made his way carefully to the far side of the sidewalk and from there watched to see what would happen.
First Gergely emerged from the Erdélyi wine bar, and like the experienced, born organizer of every dreadful deed, whistled for a cab. He promised the cabby a good tip and whispered something in his ear. Next came Skultéty and behind him Pál, bareheaded. He was putting his brand-new straw hat on his silky blond hair; the vegetable fibers in it, once alive, were now just as faded, just as dead, as the skull that it covered. He got into the cab first, followed by Gergely and Skultéty. Off they went.
Esti strolled homewards along Andrássy út. He had smoked thirty cigarettes that night and drunk nine espressos, and he was suffering from nicotine and caffeine poisoning. He was panting. He stopped again and again to lean on the walls of houses, felt his pulse at the radial bone in his right arm and at his neck. His weak heart was throbbing. He felt sick. He didn’t even care how he had come to this. Together with the nasty experience he had brought away a kind of warmth, an animal warmth and affection, of which it was pleasant to think — a man’s last love. He felt richer for having been selflessly loved by mistake for a couple of hours.
He was no gloomier than at other times. There were still stars in the sky. A light breeze blew on the bridge, and in its deep bed the Danube rolled on irrevocably to the beat of continuity and passing. When he opened the door of his study, where through years of practice he could always be in readiness, he sat down mechanically at his desk, fished out a couple of sheets from the untidy heap of paper, and read them, so as to find the voice necessary to go on and put on paper the chapter of the novel which he had already drafted in his head. What he had seen and heard that night he put aside to mature, to be forgotten somewhat and then retrieved from his soul one day, when the time was right.
The cab screeched through the night.
The driver drove well in excess of the permitted speed, flat out, in hopes of a tip. At the rear of the car the little mauve lamp burned with an unnatural chemical light. In front the headlights cast a carpet of glittering rays on the dark surface of the road — the rubber tires were never to catch up with it. This carpet of rays appeared to change, sometimes seeming new at every moment, but sometimes it stood still, and it seemed that it was the old one and the same that the cab was carrying along and, as it never wore out, spreading it again and again before itself with lightning speed in its immaculate brightness.
Pál sat on the back seat, watching this play of light and entertained by it. The sensation that he was gently rising and falling at sea came again, but this time much more strongly. He kept leaning out to look at his face in the mirror of the water, but the waves were now too high and he could see nothing.
Gergely sat beside him. Skultéty was facing them on the little folding seat. They were thinking of how the two of them would deal with him. Pál, however, was quiet. He gave no more thought to the assurances by which he had been turned against the cruel psychiatrists. He licked his thin lips, fragrant with alcohol, and did not speak.
Thus he quite faded into the background on that journey. In the gloom from time to time three heads moved: his own, Gergely’s, and Skultéty’s.
They did not speak either. Gergely yawned.
The car lurched on the uneven ground, gave a mighty blast on the horn, and stopped outside the gate of St. Miklós Hospital.
There was no need to ring, the porter opened the gate at the sound of the horn.
Gergely got out, Skultéty next. Finally Pál.
He went over to the porter.
“Who’s on duty?” he asked of ciously.
“Dr. Wirth.”
Pál stood erect. The wind blew at the unfastened wings of his splendid raincoat.
When the others had joined him he said:
“Give me a cigarette.”
The flame of the lighter lit up his face. Now it was as calm and serious as ever in the past.
“What’s the time?” he asked.
“Quarter to three.”
“Right, let’s go,” said he, and set off with resolute steps, with that air of being at home that journalists have in unfamiliar places.
Gergely and Skultéty followed a yard behind him.
On the first floor a lock creaked. A gray door opened on a long, narrow corridor lit by two dim electric lamps. At the door Pál stubbed out his cigarette and glanced back at his friends, but they were hanging back. Gergely was bending down as if tying a shoelace that had come undone. So he went inside by himself.
The iron door clanged to behind him and the attendant turned the key.
Gergely and Skultéty paused reflectively outside the door for a few seconds. Then they went back down the stairs and got into the cab, which had waited for them.
They both had a sense of death, the common fate of us all, which, in whatever form it comes, is equally final and sooner or later gets the better of us. Gergely, who had witnessed many a shooting and hanging, coughed and muttered something that sounded like a curse. Skultéty had been laughing out loud and braying so much all evening that his ribs ached. They did not speak. Gergely sat on the padded seat, Skultéty on the folding seat. The place where Pál had sat remained vacant. There was an air of mourning in the car.