Several days later he finally broke down and used the services of professionals; these were equipped with a removal van. His furniture was ordinary, even a little scratched and worn. That evening, however, Roman candles flared merrily over the street.
The kids got off the train before I did. Novels and articles have already been written about them; they've been interviewed and made the subject of documentaries, and
not just in our country, of course. They've been studied by sociologists, psychologists and criminologists, and spoken about with understanding, pity and disgust; everyone has tried to capture or at least caricature their faces. I refer anyone interested in them to the relevant literature.
It occurs to me that we are approaching a frontier. We have used up not only most of our fuel, our non-ferrous metals, our drinking water, our clean air; we've used up our stories as well. There is nothing new to add.
So they won't have to admit that fact, authors invent things out of desperation; they describe how the child hero is buried in the earth up to his neck and how the crows circle around him, ready to peck out his eyes. Or they force him to watch as the father offers his under-age daughter to a goat as a sexual object. They have the hero experience an orgasm while raping a sixty-year-old woman connected to a life-support system. Or they try to excite the reader with a tale of a man deprived of his manhood by a bolt of lightning. These authors may think that they have, indeed, found a new story, or at least a new dimension of horror and ugliness, but they only think this because they've forgotten the ancient tales of Oedipus or Tantalus. They have not read their Suetonius and they haven't experienced a fraction of what Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Čosič or Kulka have gone through, and with them dozens or rather millions of others. Stories cannot be woven from horrors or ugliness, nor from perversion or debauchery. There are still people who long for solidarity and know that life without dignity is not real life, but I'm afraid their number is diminishing, just as real craftsmen and their apprentices, mendicant friars, sailors, merchants and travellers who walked or went on horseback are dying out. And I'm not
surprised at the diminishment: most people have long ago been swept away in the tide of the mundane, though they stood defiantly on their tiptoes.
As I approached my cousin's house, I saw her smiling gypsy neighbour hanging out the washing.
I had first come here to see my cousin back in the winter, and the neighbour was hanging out the washing then too. The moment she saw me — a complete stranger— she waved to me, and I waved back. And then she shrugged her shoulders, as if to say: It's too late. You should have come sooner. And she smiled a broad smile, as if to add: But we'll see if we can do something about it. She was scarcely eighteen.
I saw her husband soon afterwards. An enormous moustache sprouted under his nose and a beer belly hung over his belt. He had gigantic hands. I would not have wanted to be caught in their grip.
My cousin noticed that I enjoyed watching those two, and she told me his name was Sandor and that he worked on the collective farm. Her name was Marie. They had married very young — when she was fifteen — and now they had two daughters. A pity I'd missed the gypsy wedding, she said. Then she took a small painting out of a wooden chest. It depicted several svelte little witches stepping out of an automobile to join their companions in a dance. Among the witches I recognized our young neighbour.
'Why did you paint her that way?' I asked.
'She's in the right company,' my cousin declared, arousing my curiosity even further.
I spent the night in my cousin's cottage, and the next day I saw the husband, Sandor, dressed fit to kill, hurrying to catch the train.
No sooner had the train rattled off than a greying, elegant man appeared at the fence. The young mother ran out of the house, but I couldn't hear what they were talking about, though I could occasionally hear high, flirtatious female laughter.
'Sandor won't be back until late tonight,' my cousin remarked. 'By then everything will be back to normal.'
Soon after, the woman, bundled up in a big woollen scarf, left the house with her children and went off with the man.
But at noon, unexpectedly, the husband returned. I happened to see him hurrying home from the station. He was gripping two parcels in his enormous hands. He banged on the gate for a while, and when no one came to open it for him, he unlocked it himself. And then, though two walls separated us, I heard him calling her name. He repeated it several times, his voice rising, finally, to an inarticulate roar. At least it seemed that way to me, though perhaps he was only shouting from a more distant room.
I began to anticipate a possible story in which passions are carried far above the surface of things: free, destructive, enthralling — until I began to worry that it might all come to a head in mindless violence.
A while later Sandor appeared, no longer in his Sunday clothes. He had put on a red windbreaker, and was pulling a sleigh behind him. I didn't understand what the sleigh was for. God knows what, or whom and in what state, he was preparing to drag off.
I watched in astonishment as he walked towards a hillside, where children were playing in the snow. Then I could see his red windbreaker swooping down the hill.
In the early evening, I saw him in the pub. The landlord
brought him beer, and I heard him say out loud, to amuse the other tables, 'You look a little the worse for wear, Sandor.'
The gypsy took a drink. 'You should've seen the dream I had!' And he started telling them about it. An army officer had sent him up to Mars and ordered him to come back to earth on foot. 'And the cocksucker only gave me three days to do it. I had to run so fast I was dying of thirst.' He finished off his beer, then added bitterly, 'And I still have to write it down.'
My cousin explained that, because of their youth, her neighbours had been required to take marriage counselling before the wedding. There they'd been taught how to build their relationship, and had also been alerted to the meaning of dreams, in which the repressed subconscious speaks; if it remained mute, they were told, it could drive one to commit indiscretions. Sandor had been so startled by the notion of a subconscious that he agreed to write his dreams down, and then take them to the psychologist from time to time. But Sandor didn't usually dream, except about food and the army. 'So I sometimes lend him one of my dreams about monsters,' my cousin concluded, 'and he chops my wood in return.'