When they turned around the first time they could still see it; when they turned around the second time they could no longer make out the pale blinking of the cat’s-eyes in the darkness filled with the sound of roaring waves.
Every morning his story ended differently, and the next morning it continued in yet another way. Once he had the spectacles on his nose, the sharpened sight of his surroundings made the feelings guarded by his dreams vanish. Before going to make his bed in strict military fashion, he lingered for a few seconds by the small table. He did not clasp his hands and his lips did not move, but he was praying. Always the same thing, the Lord’s Prayer. He prayed that he might see Fervega again. The Lord’s Prayer suited him because he didn’t have to pay attention to the sequence of words; while reciting them he could think of things he was forbidden to think about. At times the prayer carried him across great distances; the words were free to meditate on themselves.
Now he would turn to the Father as a faithful son, now he himself would be the Father who had to take care of the son. His feeling had nothing to do with gratitude. With his prayer he neither asked nor expressed gratitude for anything; perhaps, rather, he gave something. That is how he offered himself up to whatever was yet to come.
But never again could he fill the space that had been emptied. There was no fairness or equality in the name of which he could drag another man’s bed in there.
When they finally fell into captivity, the British first took them to a small town called Pfeilen. There was a tall Hungarian among the British, one András Rott, a dark-haired young man who was able to talk to them.
He consoled them; boys, relax, everything will be all right.
He saw a sign of his aging in what he missed so terribly. On that summer morning, guaranteed to turn into a scorcher, he forgot the Lord’s Prayer. The cloudless clear sky had not promised relief for weeks. Heaven, where the Father was supposed to dwell, had no outer form, and it did not have the color of the sky either. It could not be blue, and dark clouds could not move across it with the wind. When he uttered that word, heaven, he saw the kind of sky Catholics paint on the ceilings of their churches. At other times he saw nothing, but the lack did not bother him, because he had no doubt the word spoke of an invisible beauty. But now the word in his mouth turned into something he had to spit out immediately. It reminded him most of the sand with the smell of algae and shells he had just wiped off his lips. As if some unequivocal whispering in his ear were saying that, contrary to what he had thought until now, there is more than one heaven and the number of Fathers is countless.
But he could not contemplate things like this, could not even imagine them.
The tension-filled silence in the other trailer that alerted Bizsók also awakened Tuba. He lay on his stomach, his head sunk on a pillow. He was not a man who scared easily, yet a spasm coursed through his softly resting body, first making his skin realize that something extraordinary was happening, and only then making him open his eyes, alarmed. He saw what he saw, which made his entire body become covered in goose bumps, but his muscles were still asleep in the warmth under his blanket.
There was more light in this trailer than in the other one, its small window gave on the water, the mirror of the river water hurled up on the ceiling the light it received from the sun rising in the vaporous mist.
Dark spots trembled in the light, the ethereal shadows of poplars.
Notes
*March 15, Hungary’s National Day, memorializes the revolution of 1848, which in Hungary began on March 15 with insurrections in Budapest.
*On October 23, 1956, many thousands of unarmed civilians and a few thousand lightly armed revolutionaries rose up in Budapest to protest against Hungary’s tyrannical Communist regime. As the demonstrations continued, four divisions of Soviet troops went to the capital at the request of the threatened regime and took up positions guarding government buildings and important intersections. They were met with vehement resistance, which continued until October 28, when a cease-fire was arranged. Political prisoners were freed, radio stations and newspapers liberated, and a newly installed multiparty government under Imre Nagy announced on November 1 that Hungary was withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact, the military alliance led by the USSR. Thirteen more divisions of Soviet troops and armored columns then arrived to put a stop to these revolutionary actions, which ended on November 4, though civilian resistance continued for some time. More than 2,500 Hungarians died in the uprising.
*When the Communist Party gained full control of the postwar Hungarian government in 1949 it nationalized many enterprises.
*W. Averell Harriman, American ambassador in Moscow in 1943–46, wrote a report on the Yalta Conference of February 1945, which he had attended, for President Harry S. Truman, in which he warned of future competition between the West and the Soviet Union. In late 1945 President Truman asked the journalist Mark Ethridge to report on conditions in Soviet-dominated Bulgaria and Romania, where he found widespread suppression of dissent and lack of basic freedoms.
*The noted painter Walter Leistikow (1865–1908) was, in 1898, one of the founders of the Berlin Secession.
*The Arrow Cross Party, founded in 1935, was a pro-Nazi national socialist party, which led Hungary’s so-called Government of National Unity from October 1944 until March 1945. The ÁVH, the State Protection Authority, was Hungary’s secret police force from 1945 to 1956, closely aligned with the Soviet Union’s secret police force; it had its own reputation for brutality, however.
*In September 1944, the Soviet Army invaded Hungary and in late December began its siege of Budapest, then held by combined German and Hungarian forces. The siege, marked by heavy artillery bombardment and street-by-street tank and infantry battles that were among the most ferocious of the war, lasted until February 13, 1945, when the remaining defenders surrendered, by which time more than 80 percent of Budapest’s buildings and all of its bridges were destroyed or damaged.
*The Felvidék comprises the upland, hilly territories north of the Tisza and Danube rivers, until 1918 part of Hungary but now in Slovakia.
*They are speaking of The Good Soldier Švejk an unfinished satirical novel about the Austro-Hungarian army by the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek, published in the 1920s.
*Mór Jókai (1825–1904) was the author of countless novels, of which this was one (translated into English and published as Poor Plutocrats [1899]).
*Count Pál Teleki, a controversial diplomat and geographer who became prime minister of Hungary for the second time in February 1939, committed suicide in April 1941. Hitler was then insisting that Hungary assist Germany’s invasion of Yugoslavia, a nation with which Teleki had concluded a nonaggression pact only five months before. Teleki regarded as treasonous Hungary’s subsequent agreement to let Germany transport troops across its territory.
*Margit Island is named after Hungary’s most venerated saint; the ruins of a medieval monastery named in her honor are in the center of the island, which is now a park with many features and attractions.