At any rate, judging by the light, he figured it had to be at least an hour past noon.
Nothing was happening in the motionless heat.
He was waiting for a nonexistent ringing of bells. Settled in his ears were old sound-memories of the bell in Jászberény.
And then the thought positively pounced on him: he must have gone mad a long time ago. He waited patiently for the thought or sensation to pass, but waiting did not change the insane condition. Light made time disappear in itself, and that was the reason nothing could happen around him that would return his stolen property.
Or perhaps an atomic bomb had been dropped somewhere after all, as they had promised it would be, and he was the only one left alive for miles around, all alone. In his fear he should get up. Everyone had perished; no living thing was left except him.
In the meantime his shirt had dried on the branch, from which he had to conclude that some amount of real time must have passed. He looked up into the foliage as if expecting a message there. Then his wife must have perished in some bad way, and it felt good to acknowledge that. His kid brother must have gone with her; at least no one could blame him for their miserable lives.
He saw nothing unusual in the foliage. But the sky above was incandescent.
This apricot tree stood at the center not only of his garden but also of his heart and thoughts.
Ten years earlier, when after a wedding feast that had stretched into dawn he took leave of his friends and went roaming aimlessly in the unfamiliar fields, he picked out not a site for the coming years but this gigantic apricot tree. Or one should say that between him and the apricot tree it was the tree that decided their common fate. Innocently, he urinated on the tree trunk, looking up involuntarily at its branches heavy with fruit. Stuffed with rich food, drunk on cheap drink, his voice surfaced to say that he should live here. And the unclaimed apricot tree dryly confirmed, yes, you’ll live here with me, you have no other place.
The tree stood at the center of a flat bare landscape; more precisely, it gave meaning to the wide-open nothingness staring at the sky. He had never experienced anything like this in his life. No apricot tree grows this big. He didn’t have to do work on it, because he never found even a single little dry branch or worm-eaten holes in the trunk or worms in its fruit. It raised its enormous, healthily dense, and proportionately arranged crown above the flat world. Reddish veins ran along the stalks of its shiny waxen leaves. It gripped the loose soil with roots as thick as a man’s arm, because in its youth it very prudently had allowed the dominant wind in the area to tilt it a bit. It seemed to have acquired its circumstances with its shape. It was the sole survivor of a former fruit orchard. Every two years it had an abundant crop of juicy, richly colored, aromatic, tasty fruit.
Now he was standing under his apricot tree, holding in his hand the elusive proof of measured time: his dry shirt.
A little later he saw two bicycling figures approach.
Because in the meantime the pastor had come home from his mission in the cathedral town across the river, and been told by the puzzled yet malicious ferrymen that there had been no noonday bell. They were godless, all of them, and if they could do nothing else they swore terribly in front of their pastor. And he waited in vain for his grandson, first by the window in his cool office and much later at the gate; the boy didn’t come home on the street but turned up much later from the direction of the gardens. When he heard behind his back the dull thud of feet on the long brick-paved veranda, at least he no longer had to struggle with a fear that perhaps the boy had drowned in the river.
He was puffing like a child.
With the momentum of his inexplicable anger, the pastor swiveled around and Dávid received a powerful slap on the face.
Barefoot, wearing only his small red bathing trunks, the very shy, daydreaming teenager stood before him, shirt in hand. He was at the age when boys begin to grow as if they were being stretched and their voices deepen but they are completely unaware of the maturing processes in their bodies. From running, his thin naked body was thickly covered with dust in which his perspiration drew stripes.
He’d run more than two kilometers in the scorching sun. In his head, throbbing with the pulsing blood, the heat, the thumping of his feet, and fear, he had thoroughly prepared to account for his time, but this he hadn’t expected. He’d known that his negligence would not go unpunished, and he also knew that his grandfather would be back from the city at half past one. But the slap caught him unprepared. He had truly hoped that his grandfather would not be told of his negligence. He had to make his carefully prepared explanation credible, and therefore he could not pay much attention to the sudden physical or mental pain.
The effort to ignore it distorted his features, but his eyes, filled with real tears, remained attentive. And, waving his blue-striped shirt, he said, winded and weeping, that a man had wanted to take this away from him.
What man wanted to take it from you, what did he want to take from you, shouted the pastor, famed equally for his great physical strength and for his gentleness.
His voice reverberated down the street.
How could he miss the boy’s cunning look.
It seemed he not only had to avenge the already committed negligence but might also be catching his grandson on the verge of telling a terrible lie, committing a deadly sin.
Dávid had never heard such sounds escaping from his grandfather. In his alarm he wanted to add something to his explanation, but anger at his grandfather blocked his words.
How dare he hit him.
If Melinda had been here, he wouldn’t have dared. But at the moment his much older sister was visiting in an old villa in Leányfalu, working on her dissertation out on the villa’s lovely wood-framed veranda. Without Melinda he had no support. His mumbled words turned into hiccups, but he managed to squeeze out that he had no idea who the strange man was except that he was completely naked.
The pastor did not intend to restrain his raging anger. He regretted neither his loud outburst nor the slap. Let everyone on the street see it and hear it. He owed this much to his prestige in the village.
The negligence is unforgivable; it cannot remain unpunished.
But the words, coming out twisted because of the crying and hiccupping, made him lose confidence.
What naked man, the pastor groaned.
A hot rush of blood in his eyes darkened the yard, shaded by chestnut and linden trees.
Where is he, he groaned.
If someone had told him, trembling and devastated, that his grandson had drowned in the river, then his faith in the boy’s innocence would have poured balm on his immense pain, and he would have accepted God’s will. But the way things were, he had to take himself into the worst thicket of horrors. Had to be careful what to ask and how loudly to ask it. The sun beat down mercilessly on the back of his thick neck and a single careless step might pull his heavy body into the bog.
The village had to be compensated, but it did not have to know everything.
The prison guard from Vác came to mind first; many people talked about this man because he shopped in the general store and took his water from the common well, but he had not yet met him or seen him walking about naked, not even from far away.
If he had not been blinded by anger, he would have sensed the nature of the problem immediately, because Dávid would never show himself naked in front of anyone, not even in the greatest heat. He yanked the boy to him with both hands. He wanted to know everything. Peremptorily, shaking the boy’s bare shoulders, he asked what the man had done to him.