Donáth crawls sleepily out of his cubbyhole. Why is Rácz smashing things, why is he making so much noise? Donáth has only just got to sleep. Yes, he managed to get to sleep. That has to be respected. Rácz mustn’t bang about here. He’s not the boss here yet. And anyway, where’s he been for so long? There couldn’t be such a big queue at the grocer’s. Donáth nervously paces the boiler-room, pointing with his long finger. Where was Rácz hanging about all that time?
“Outside,” says Rácz through clenched teeth, and, perturbed, Donáth opens his eyes.
“With Urban, I’ll bet?” asks Donáth.
“Yes,” agrees Rácz. “Urban has tons of money. And he’s only a moonlighting taxi driver. Sometimes he does deals. Just imagine the kind of money the real racketeers must make!” Urban told him. Millions!
Donáth finds that funny and laughs. “You can’t believe everyone,” he says. “Let me give you some advice. Urban’s no friend for you. He’s a crook. You’ve got to be honest, you understand? Take this rag over there, and the solvent and go clean the boilers. I’ll take a snooze. Millions? Rubbish!”
Donáth leaves. Rácz sighs and gets down to work. In the evening he’ll watch the hotel entrance and parking lot opposite through a narrow little window in the coal store. Maybe he’ll see Silvia. He’ll wait hours for her.
* * *
At this very moment in Austria, Zdravko G. is in a bouncing van, happily travelling home from the job centre. Again, he’s struck lucky. He’s found a job, cash in hand, of course. Zdravko G. doesn’t want to lose his unemployment benefit. The owner of a historic mill in the Viennese Woods has decided to demolish and remove a two-hundred-year-old outdoor privy. Zdravko is made for this kind of work. He’ll get five thousand schillings for it. The work will take him a couple of days to finish. He can go back again for a weekend in Bratislava. He’ll look up the tall whore.
“Shit stinks,” Zdravko G. says to himself as he carries bucketfuls of it up and down, “but life is beautiful.” If he’d stayed back home, in Kosovo, he’d still be herding donkeys.
* * *
Silvia is happy, too. Zdravko, the swarthy Yugoslavian doctor, who works in Vienna, left her a thousand schillings. If she sells them at just three crowns each, she’ll have three thousand crowns. To this she has to add a hundred marks from the German whom she satisfied in his car, in the parking lot in front of the hotel. A hundred marks at twenty-five crowns each, together with the schillings make five and a half thousand crowns. Of this, five hundred go to the taxi driver and a thousand to the receptionist in the Ambassador. That leaves four thousand crowns clear profit. Before two in the morning. She even got a good night’s sleep. Alone. Edita comes to see her less often now. The season is ending and everyone does their best to get as big a piece of the action as possible. But four thousand crowns is not bad at all. For an amateur.
Silvia is no professional. She has her own profession. She’s a cabaret artist. After the show she does a couple of punters. Nobody can take that away from her. It is like a hobby, just moonlighting. One day she’ll get married and will stop screwing in cars and hotel rooms.
Her landlady thinks Silvia is a student. Any doubts can be smoothed over with money. The landlady isn’t bothered. If the money runs out, she will be. That’s life. Silvia also keeps to an unwritten and unspoken rule: she never brings anyone home. No men.
“You’re such a good girl,” her landlady says. “You shouldn’t exhaust yourself studying. Let your friend study on her own so late at night. Or she can come over to your place once in a while. She hasn’t slept here for a long time. And anyway, you should take a break. Relax. Have some fun. Do you have a boyfriend yet? No? That’s good. You’ve plenty of time left for that.”
Silvia opens a metal casket and puts the money in it. She has to make all the money she can while her breasts are firm and her vulva is pink and tight. Whatever’s left over will be good enough for a future husband. Silvia knows almost everything about him already. He’ll be tall, greying, West German, Austrian, American, rich Arab, whatever. He’ll own at least a Mercedes. He is a widower, an old bachelor, something like that. He has to have Good Samaritan tendencies combined with acquisitiveness. Only a man like that can take a whore out of circulation and make her his wife without reminding her about it during every little quarrel. But so long as this silver panther is still hiding somewhere abroad, Silvia makes do with Zdravko G.
* * *
Rácz is polishing brass parts. The boilers are ancient. Every boiler is marked with a faded plate saying: HANS-KOKESCH-WERKE IN WIEN 1895. “Don’t spare the polish,” Donáth tells him, after he finally gets up. “But don’t overdo it. Use something in between. Then we’ll go and eat,” he says emphatically. “We’ll have a good meal.” Rácz says nothing.
“You bought the beer,” says Donáth, “but I thought of us, too. Take this,” he addresses Rácz in a conciliatory tone. “Take a swig!” A long bottle glistens in his black hands. “You know, when you’ve worked in the boiler-room for fifty years, you’ll get bees in your bonnet, too. But Urban’s a layabout, a loser. Have a drink!”
Rácz won’t say no. The home-distilled schnapps is weak, but it does warm you up on a cold morning. Work gets easier straight away. But all Donáth’s attempts to start a conversation get only a yes or a no out of Rácz. Just so the old man knows Rácz is no doormat. Donáth has to realise that Rácz may like a drink, but can’t be bought.
After dinner Donáth decides to do what he’d been putting off for a long time — testing the heating controls for the actual Ambassador Hotel. Meanwhile the coal is delivered.
“Right,” says Donáth, “this is where our real work begins. This is your coal and you have to unload it. Get a move on, or the gypsies will bring their buckets and there’ll be nothing left. Best to do it today. I’ll check the hotel controls myself. Then I’ll sit and knock a few drinks back. It’s been fifty years, after all.”
The coal depot lorry makes ten trips. Long into the night Rácz keeps hurling coal down into the cellar by lamp-light. Now and then he runs downstairs to shovel the pile away from under the window chute, so that there’s room for all the coal. From the bar and cabaret ventilation openings comes the muffled sound of music. It’s raining heavily, but Rácz works bare-chested. Steam rises from his back and neck. The rain washes away the sweat. Rácz spits on his palms and keeps working, without a break, mechanically, monotonously.
Only towards dawn does he knock off. Exhausted, he goes down and drops onto his bench. He puts the rolled coat under his head and sleeps like a log. His arms throb.
The next morning is overcast and wet. Rácz looks with distaste at what’s left of the coal glistening in the rain. In the dark the heap looked smaller.
“At the end of the week we’ll fire the boilers,” says Donáth after breakfast, looking at the thermometer. It really had got cold.
Rácz unloads the rest of the coal by dinner-time. He waits to see if Silvia will appear, but he’s out of luck.
For the last few days and nights it’s been cold in the boiler-room. One boiler can’t heat the boiler-room any longer. The men have nothing to do and sit huddled in their coats, sipping tea with rum. At night Rácz often wakes up and listens to the coal heap settling down behind the wall. It makes a dark, greasy sound.
“Good coal,” remarks Donáth and crushes a little piece in his hand. “You won’t have to stoke too much, it will burn for a long time.”