I have nothing to be afraid of, he answered quietly. I don’t even want to wait for the big experience. But even if I were afraid, that wouldn’t be such a big crime. You wouldn’t have to censure me for it. Anyway, it’s dangerous, I’d call it a professional mistake, to keep harboring a fear we don’t dare admit even to ourselves.
Now they all grew gloomy and heavy, despite their efforts to be cheery.
That’s what I think, András.
Not a rare occurrence in men’s conversation. Once the obligatory ease is gone, when they have nothing to flaunt in front of one another, a mutual embarrassment arises, and if no one knows how to deal with it, conversation about more serious topics simply runs aground. Ágost justifiably felt that André was rebuking him, and he did the same in return. Peu à peu he understood what the other one was saying. He should not be surprised if he no longer wanted to protect him. No surprise if other people also feared his fickleness; the moment was not far off when in some official place they might ask whether this behavior hadn’t started to stink or even burn.
Had he not swum to the other shore.
During the last few weeks, Ágost had indeed played with the unavoidable thought that he should swim across, and that is why he felt André’s glance piercing his heart.
But exposed to the rebuking glance of his friend and subordinate, André Rott should have felt that his views not only supported but actually prepared the annihilation threatening humankind.
Or that he was the one who had initiated the investigation of Ágost, of which Ágost was certainly aware.
What he really wanted to let his friend know was that the investigative process had already been put into motion; it was time to lie low.
They should have made a decision about something they had debated artfully every day for years but could never resolve. The pangs of conscience provoked by rebuking glances were linked not to what they said or did not say, but to something they wouldn’t have dared communicate even with secret signals: it had to do with the essence of their profession, with the question of whether there was, would be, or might be any palpable meaning and explanation for everything they had done with their lives until now. If they had been mistaken, after all, and there was nothing in the future to justify the necessary and accidental crimes of the past, then à quoi bon vivre, was it worth their while to stay alive, or, alternatively, what should they do with what was left of their lives. After all, being a socialist or a Communist in Geneva or London, and happy that the dictatorship of the proletariat had finally been established in distant lands, was very different from returning, with the same frame of mind and awareness, to a Budapest where the world had been shut off for good like a dripping faucet.
Still, Kovách thought these two were good boys, though they didn’t really understand anything.
They chatted on, discussing abstract questions, most of which he himself didn’t understand.
The practical question he kept asking himself was whether they would be left alive; whether the managers of the firm hadn’t been trying to figure out a way to get to them, and how long that would take.
The long shadow of obligatory and inviolable silence, which they had been able to avoid only at exceptional moments, still tarried in their midst.
Ágost was struggling with his recurrent attacks of melancholy, for which neither he nor his friends had any balm. The danger was not imaginary but real. It had become his determined, cherished, and probably unalterable intention to kill himself; this was not a secret because once before they had collectively yanked him back to life.
It had happened about two years ago and since then their conversations had come to resemble a hopeless hurdle race. They should have somehow risen above the memory of that brutal experience, but because they could not, each of them heard, at different times, a false ring in Ágost’s sentences. Something had opened up and, precisely because it had brought them closer, could not be closed again. At the same time, all three of them knew that in case of an investigation it would be impossible not to acknowledge the matter and also, since so much time had elapsed, it would also be impossible to do so. At this point, embarrassing for all of them, André Rott usually grew weak and, to keep tears of helpless fury from erupting or, worse, to keep from pouncing on the other man with frustrated and insane hysterics, he felt compelled to defend himself frantically.
And at just such a juncture, Hansi usually ran out of his charged jests about parts of the lower body.
But André admitted his friend’s anguish of unknown origin as he stood in front of him, and he did it in a way that made it painful to himself.
He preferred to make amends. Even though in the depths of his soul he reproached and accused his friend, he also hated him. He had to hate him for weakening him with his attacks of melancholy. The other two had been waiting for the investigation that always preceded harsher measures, but André knew that the investigation of Lippay was already under way. And that at a certain stage they would haul Lippay over the coals. He envied Lippay, was even jealous of him; why hadn’t they started the investigations with him; he’d either choose friendship and lie, or stick to his convictions and profession and therefore betray his friend; and he would, too. But that would also mean betraying himself. He had a third choice: to inform on his friend, to accuse him gravely and baselessly. He could not even lower his eyes. Perhaps he was too craven; perhaps his ethical-religious upbringing was still more powerful than his principles. He did not dare commit such a betrayal, though he knew from experience that the greater the betrayal, the greater its success, which would greatly increase his pleasure.
But he could not decide what would give him greater pleasure, because he loved him.
Come on, you’re talking nonsense, he said very quietly, disconcertedly, as, driven by the instinct to flee, he took a step backward and with a swift movement of his foot kicked his cabin door shut before their noses.
At the very same instant Hansi’s head rose, as if hesitating whether to abandon his comfortable position on Ágost’s smooth and hairless thigh. Unlike André, he always knew what to do with Lippay. He well understood that one could suffer from something that could not be named accurately and even physicians called depression for lack of a better label. André did not understand this, became angry because of it, considered it all nothing but feminine fancy. Not only did he brush it aside, he was unaware of his own true condition and, as a result, in the well-developed man’s body there remained the little boy. Kovách couldn’t have described or explained it, but he saw its depth; the bottomless pit was there, gaping inside him as well, though for quite some time he wouldn’t acknowledge that what he saw was nothingness itself.
Void.
One senses that at this place one should see or feel something.
He must tear himself away from his pleasurable selfishness. These were not things of great consequence, only a patch of raw warmth of skin, or another body’s fine vaporous fragrance.
He sat up.
Kovách exuded rough goodness, and somehow it was also his nature greedily to collect all bodily pleasures, to hoard them senselessly, as if one could store enough warmth of female and male bodies or scents of male and female pubic hair and stockpile them for leaner times.