Dávid sobbed, leaning against his grandfather’s chest.
He tried to make it understood that he was sobbing, trembling, and reproachful because of the mercilessness of that slap. But in fact his helplessness was weeping behind the deceit.
He didn’t do anything, he sobbed.
And where did you leave your pants, asked the pastor, his voice growing thin as his impatience mounted.
He took away my pants, cried the boy. He wanted to take away my shirt.
As if the boy’s smudgy tears were dissolving his light body on the pastor’s chest.
The innocence of this reply gave the pastor some relief, yet fighting his conciliatory urge he thrust his grandson away, but without letting go of him.
Why would he take away your pants, how could anybody take away your pants, he shouted.
The boy stopped bawling, he was hiccupping. From his grandfather’s point of view he indeed had to consider himself an incorrigible recidivist many times over, so it was important to muster everything he could to dispel all possible suspicion. From his incoherent answer his grandfather understood only that he had been to the big pit.
He admits having gone into the water and having swum to the other side. From there he saw the man taking his pants away.
He ran after him, managed to get the shirt out of his hand but failed to retrieve the pants.
Gone were his nice summer pants.
At this, the pastor released his grandson from his strong grip and with large steps took off for the shed.
What the villagers called the big pit was a long-abandoned sand mine. More than a hundred years earlier Gypsies had made adobe here every summer. They soon ran out of the material necessary for adobe. Under the layer of clay was an enormous amount of brimstone-yellow sand glittering with quartz; people came to take it away by the wagonload, even from faraway villages. They gave up sand mining only when they reached, about four meters down, a water-permeable layer of gravel in direct contact with the riverbed. The gravel was peculiarly granulated, like rare pearls. And the shovels turned over rather curious things in it. Shards of pottery burned black, sooty bellies, ears, and beaks of cooking vessels with small legs. Worn-down thin blades of crudely forged iron tools and human bones turned spongy or polished to a marble smoothness: split pelvises, skulls smashed in with battle-axes, and fractured shinbones.
The first heavy snowfall put an end to a shameful treasure hunt.
Older people still recall the spring when, where the pit had been, they found a lovely round little pond with translucently motionless water.
Now not even children went to swim in it because nobody could forget that there was a cemetery under the water. And strangers had no way of knowing that behind the clusters of trees this pond lay concealed. What was under the water was a treacherously destroyed military camp of the early Avar era.* Ice-cold ghosts populated the area; the pond became the home of ringed snakes, water spiders, and frogs. His grandfather did not believe in ghosts but he forbade Dávid to go into the water there alone. No one who lives on the shore of this mighty river should forget that water is strong and always unpredictable. Silver-leafed and gray-trunked poplars, willows slowly dripping their sap, and thick growth of shrubs surrounded the pond and barely let the light graze its mirrorlike surface. That day, Dávid was at the pond when he should have been at the belfry to ring the bell. Here the trees had spread their branches so generously that the surface of the pond could not be seen even from the church tower, so he believed that his peculiar feeling was safely concealed and for the first time in his life he forgot about ringing the bell. He did not forget the place itself and the hearsay connected with it, not to mention the relevant proscriptions. Almost every year he spent his vacation months with his grandfather. Once, when still a small child, amid terrible shuddering, he had swum across the pond all by himself on a dare and a bet.
He won a popgun, which in the end he did not get.
He did not take the fears of the local boys very seriously, but despite all the prohibitions he too was a little afraid of ghosts. This summer he rarely did things together with the boys. He preferred the dark, cool, and spacious rooms of the parsonage, where he read romantic English novels, replete with screeching wind in old fireplaces, abandoned dusty rooms, and haunting ghosts in whose company he roamed by himself, dreaming of his future life, or together with them looked for isolated places by the river whence he could observe the bathers and rowers who sometimes camped on the island for weeks and lived their own mysterious lives before his eyes.
He sentenced himself to sheer observance; he tried to renounce everything that might be considered amusement or was beyond a strictly objective survey of the world. He was curious to learn what the minimal activity was that he needed to exist. His impression was that the smaller the area of contact with his surroundings, the smaller his food intake, and the less love spent on others, the more clearly he would see his own intentions, would not lose his way, and could hope to find more meaning in his actions in the dim world of instincts and in the pitiless chaos churned up by adults.
His grandfather noticed in all this only that the otherwise lively and talkative boy now fell silent for days, the once voracious child hardly touched his food, sat daydreaming with a book in his hands, listened to inspiring parables with a blank expression of incomprehension, evaded questions showing concern about him, or simply lied. The grandfather could not have known that the boy’s monastic vows, made to himself, were dictating and determining this changed behavior.
He was silent not because he had something to hide but because he had vowed not to speak. He picked at his food not because he had no appetite but because he was testing his self-control. He was daydreaming not because he was uninterested in the continuing chapters in his grandfather’s devotional history but because he was timing the duration of his ability to keep his mind on a single topic.
He failed with his most delicate vows.
He decided not to let his thoughts flit about unbridled. He also decided not to go to the pond ever again since he already knew everything there was to know about it; but a compelling force was still at work contrary to his vows, and no matter how carefully he listened for it he could not catch it; undetected, it laid him low. Indeed, he knew everything in advance that was worth knowing of the joy and sorrow of sheer existence, but he considered his knowledge as straying, because he had no idea that everyone had the same experiences.
There is no human being without a functioning presentiment. He wanted to overcome his penchant for this sort of special knowledge and experience, but for that he would first have had to ascertain the falseness of his experiences and the incorrectness of his knowledge. He found no finer tools than those already at his disposal. The greater ascetic authority he acquired over himself, the greater his awareness became that this was still not adequate knowledge or experience. The rectitude of presentiment can be checked only over time; one has to look back on it from the distance of decades.
He began resorting to trickery and double-dealing, and not only with his grandfather but with himself too.
He wanted to reach the point of having no wishes, since they color all exact knowledge, and thus he could not imagine what the world would be like without him.
He wanted at all cost to keep from going to the pond; and if he did go, he had to do so as if it had no significance, with no continuation or consequence. The deep, slightly inclining former wagon trail led him into the dense thicket. Uninitiated eyes could detect no road here. The hard clumps of grass covering the erstwhile wheel tracks never sprouted into bushes or nettles. A forward-moving body brushed open the loosely bent shrub branches, which would then close gently behind it.