At noon, when they came back from having a couple of beers and discovered the strange items in the trailer, a similarly inexplicable thing happened, but this time among the Gypsies.
Tuba slapped Jakab on the face, hard.
And at the same time the older Téglás brother lowered his eyes; if he had not, all the emotions that goodwill and sufferance were curbing would have flared up in the darkness of those eyes. Bizsók grunted loudly. Imre Téglás began to shout and flail his arms.
He stopped instantly because his brother obviously wanted something else.
In the machine was the molten material for at least another sixteen rounds with the wheelbarrows, the tarry mix that had to be poured out at the right places before Bizsók could start with the steamroller. He kept watching his men from behind his thick glasses, but he was at a loss as to what to do.
As though his leniency with Tuba had now come to avenge itself.
Jakab threw himself, screaming and crying, on the floor of the hot trailer, not because the slap had been hard but in desperation. He denied having stolen these expensive, strange items. He kept banging his shaven head with his fist, and if they hadn’t stopped him he would have banged his head against the trailer wall.
He yelled and argued in Hungarian and in Romany, as the good Lord was his witness it wasn’t him, what did He want from him, it wasn’t he who stole, somebody else had stolen his new work clothes.
Actually nobody had accused him of anything.
But how did that expensive pair of pants wind up on the clothes rack, and that fine high-class shirt, pale-blue oxford, and where had those welted, barely used old English box* shoes come from, now under the racks, one neatly side by side with the other, that is what they all asked themselves.
And how indeed could the boy’s brand-new work clothes have disappeared at the same time, clothes he had never worn and which he so treasured he’d rather wear his uncle’s old things.
And what happened to Tuba’s rubber-soled protective boots.
It was clear to Bizsók that if he went to the local gendarmes and reported the case to the company, he’d lose three of his men in one fell swoop. Judging by the Téglás brothers’ behavior, he could expect nothing from them. But if he did not report anything, what would they do with the new shoes and expensive clothes, which could only have come from one of the vacation homes in the area, where many old-fashioned gentlemen lived. He was angry at Tuba for his arbitrariness. But the anger bursting from the other man gave him a good feeling. As if Tuba had done for him what he, Bizsók, would never do.
Not even in disciplining his own sons had he ever resorted to beating, for which he had been repeatedly reproached, and he had always been ashamed of this characteristic of his, which could be construed as a personal flaw.
Bizsók had been given back his life as a present, and therefore he was averse to bullying and violence. When trouble occurred his soul would not move; he only watched what was happening around him the more closely. He was a stout man, in height just short of what is usually called medium-tall. He wore his hair in a crew cut and he had discovered it had turned gray only when, released from captivity, he looked at a mirror for the first time in years.
He had arrived home for harvesttime; it was midday. Perhaps nobody noticed him, the village was silent, he did not find the key in the usual place. Telling this story to his men one time as they sat around the fire, he said he had not even looked at anything around the house; he washed his face and drank some water from the well and sat down on a bench on the porch. He probably didn’t fall asleep; he felt neither fatigue nor hunger, but it seemed to him that twilight followed noon almost immediately.
Then he heard women’s voices approaching on the road and a frightened child stared at him, as did a cow trudging in through the open gate.
The child ran back out and began shouting that an old beggar was sitting on their porch.
The source of laughter is not always gaiety; that is how his listeners laughed.
First he wanted to know why the key wasn’t in its place.
The others knew that his wife was a very beautiful woman and they understood that he had a distrustful and jealous nature. He always expected the worst, though until now he had shown no signs of this. The woman reached up and took the key out of a crack between the wall and the doorpost, where he could not have found it; he could only widen his eyes in astonishment. The woman opened the door, they went inside, and she immediately squatted down before the stove as she had always done.
She looked back at him from there.
But from that point he did not go on with the story for the others.
It was as if he had walked into a strange place; he hesitated. For two whole years he had not seen this person to whom he now returned, not even in his dreams.
In the morning she made dumplings rich in shortening, as if she knew exactly what he wanted.
He did tell this part to the Gypsies but kept quiet about how the two of them had finally embraced. Yet in the light of the fire, the others could easily discern on his dreamy countenance what he was bashfully holding back from them.
His face showed that night with her as he saw it through the fire.
The next day he could swing the scythe only about three times, if that, before he became so dizzy he had to lie down.
And he did not tell them that the woman poured cold water on her kerchief and rubbed his heart and wiped his forehead with it. Even in the shade he kept breaking out in waves of cold sweat.
What was to be done, he weighed only forty-seven kilos, doctors had weighed him, he told the Gypsies by way of explanation. In that condition he was hardly fit for harvesting.
In his sleep angry waves of the sea occasionally hurled themselves at him, right under his eyes.
He saw the golden brilliance of the sea before him, the ways that insistent dry winds ruffled wheat fields under an infinite sky and with their whirlpools beat down and twirled the ears of grain.
At other times the sky was dark, and sand was churned into the dully glittering waves. He had froth between his teeth. This is how the afternoon when he had first seen the sea below Husum returned to him in his sleep.
They had surrendered below Husum, in the sand dunes. Dense sharp sleet slashed their faces, and in the sudden silence the victors’ triumphant shouts carried a long way. They were rounded up like trapped animals. The fools who still tried to run away or hide somewhere were shot on the spot.
The wind instantly obliterated all footprints.
The morning when in the other trailer they sheared Jakab’s head, Bizsók was startled to wakefulness very early. A person who remembers, or whose dreams compel him not to forget, does not analyze the past. To avoid having to be grateful for the miserable life that, in his dreams, often ended in death, he got up right away. To keep the thought of being helpless to make changes from wandering about too much. He took off the top of his striped pajamas and stepped out into the open as if uninterested in what sort of day was waiting for him.
The sky was growing lighter under a gentle mist.
He put his clean enamel washbowl on the step of the trailer and poured water into it from a pitcher. In the morning, he did not use soap, only bent over the bowl and splashed some water on himself. First on his face and neck, then on his armpits and arms, a little on his back too and on his hairy chest, but these latter areas he tried to dampen without letting the water drip on his pants. He dried himself, threw the dirty water under the trailer, and stood the washbowl on the step so it could dry properly in the sun.