Because he saw with alarm what his prayers were like. He did profit from them, the profit was personal, nothing else. With prayer he diverted his attention from his exhausted thinking and found himself ever farther from the agony that never ceased.
What could take him farther from the mercy of suffering, the only balm of the wretched, if not the cunning double-dealing of the life force.
He stood up to see about his grandson. Given the chaos of his soul, it was always a relief to see the innocence in the boy’s face. Even though he knew that at the boy’s age innocence was mainly illusory.
He looked for him everywhere and kept returning to the entrance to his office.
The tipcarts at the distant mine kept moving with their even creaking, and he knew the men working them were prisoners.
He did not want to shout. He stopped at the end of the brick walk, from there he only watched, did not want to disturb the boy or step on the dewy grass, he waited for him.
Softly he called his name.
The boy’s pajama-covered back moved under the moonlight, and he straightened up; slowly they walked toward each other.
The pastor remembered exactly what repulsive effect the overripe odor of adult bodies had had on him when he was a child. He worried about the boy; he would have preferred to know of his every step, though he knew he could not protect him from all the dangers lurking around him. He did not touch his grandchild carelessly. The slap the day before and the hug the day before that were the results of exhausted feelings.
He asked the boy why he’d once again refused to be obedient.
Alternating between complaints and excuses, Dávid deflected the rebuke; it wasn’t his fault, he couldn’t help it if he’d had another bad dream.
Seriously, almost with scientific interest, they looked at the glossed-over feelings in each other’s eyes, visible in the bluish glow of the darkness. The pastor wanted to see the bad dreams. And Dávid well remembered the exhortation about what he should and shouldn’t do if he wanted to have pleasant dreams. He did not do the forbidden things anymore. He had some mild pangs because of them. Now they let it go at this; they knew their duties and without a word, walking side by side, returned to the office.
The pastor closed the glass-paned door but did not turn the key in the lock.
I didn’t have any bad dreams, said the pastor quietly and hesitantly, but frankly I couldn’t sleep either.
Dávid stopped near the door. His grandfather did not usually talk about himself. In the warm stuffy darkness he could smell the old furniture.
Sit down, please, said the pastor, with barely perceptible embarrassment. You must know there are some sleepless nights in everyone’s life.
It felt good to say this, though he did not think the confession was quite proper. It was as if in the guise of honesty, he was bragging about his weakness.
Then, with slow steps, they pleasantly cracked the sensitive silence taking shape between them.
The darkness told Dávid that this situation was real; this time there would be no scolding. Relieved, he groped for a bench, and as he lowered himself to it he felt gratitude to the night. The pastor sat at the harmonium, automatically pulling the stool close to the instrument. Under his foot the worn pedal of the bellows creaked and the harmonium’s innards began to groan and rattle. This beginning, meant to be playful, struggled with an insistent clattering until the aged instrument found its proper breath in the familiar melody of the psalm.
It was an unassuming little melody, moving in a limited range. It never ended, only returned to its starting point. After the third repetition, the pastor shouted in a terrifying voice.
They kill widows and orphans, he sang.
He did not trust his powerful sonorous bass to the arc of sounds summoned from the old mechanism, he did not fight the unpleasant noises, he gave voice to the darkness. At the same time his hands continued the tune, ignoring his shout. When he raked the tune through the lousy pipes of his instrument for the seventh time, his voice thundered with the shards splintered from the melody.
Suffers everything in silence, in silence.
With loud shouts, he informed his God that he suffered everything in silence.
And while the pastor thus sang out his most sensitive theological worries for his grandson to hear, Balter, sitting on his chair, quietly fell asleep in the doorway of his house.
Whatever had been written in advance, whatever had to happen, happened only on the following night.
In his sleep he plopped into the lap of that young girl whom he did not remember but who kept coming back to him from his childhood. The ice-cold light of the moon no longer tormented him. Carefully it went away from the back of his neck, leaving him alone with the weight of the young girl’s head. He was awakened by the creaking of the tipcarts at the distant mine, though he did not know when or where. Prisoners doing work outside the prison were brought over around this time in a special transport. He lay on the floor where he had fallen from his chair in his sleep. He seemed to hear the stamping of their feet at the ferry. The shifts at the Dunabogdány quarry were changed once a week but, straining his memory as he lay there, Balter could not remember what day it was.
He recalled only that the change happened on Tuesday nights.
It was dawning out there in the threat-filled deep-gray landscape.
They herded them across the island, then across the bridge, and then up the mountain.
During the entire day ahead of him, he must find an answer to the question of how the footprints could go from the trunk of the apricot tree to the low-lying dirt road when there were no footprints leading to the apricot tree. Naturally he could find no explanation.
When the police officers told him later, he nodded, smiling gently at his own stupidity.
When he reached the dirt road, he could still make out the contours of the footprints, but after a few steps they disappeared, dissolved in the sand, and he stood there foolishly before the mystery.
He placed his foot in the tramp’s last footprint and stared stiffly as he saw a perfect match.
He preferred to continue being thirsty than to venture farther from his house. He listened long into the silence of early dawn with the birds waking; would he hear the prisoners marching from the direction of the paved road. As he walked he pulled the rake across his every footprint.
He preserved only the footprints leading from the trunk of the apricot tree to the dirt road, signs left by the son who was planning to kill him. It also occurred to him that perhaps a prisoner thirsting for revenge had been prowling around him.
He drank from the water he had used two days earlier to steam the string beans. The jars, wrapped in newspaper and old clothes, were still standing in the big dishwashing pot; some of them stayed there for good.
Shortly after the midday bell he left the house after all and followed his son’s footprints. He knew these tracks well and hoped to discover new ones farther off. He felt like crying when he thought of the many occasions he had taken the little toes of his kicking baby son into his mouth.
He hid the rake in the thick prickly blackthorns by the side of the dirt road.
Perhaps chance led him this way, perhaps predestination; at any rate he wound up at the pond. He had heard about it but had never seen it before for himself. The picket lay there, the one he had seen once before in the presbyter’s hand. Two nails were sticking out of it. It was an old piece of rain-beaten wood with brand-new nails. He thought about that for a long time, could not decide whether to touch it. As if he had to decide to what power he should entrust himself. He could not comprehend what sort of connection the pastor and the presbyter could have had with his son. Even though the picket lay there as clear proof of this close connection.