“But why?” the manager asks full of bitter aggrieved emotion. “Did I pay you badly? Were we on bad terms? Aren’t we friends any more?”
Ďula shakes his head. “You don’t understand. You’re very stupid. Rácz is a personality. At last, a strong personality in this hotel! And you? A few months ago you were the big boss here and where are you now? Just look at yourself! Your father-in-law won’t help you; he’s got enough worries of his own. Read the papers! I’ve got to go. I’ll tell Rácz what we talked about.”
A little while later Ďula drops in for a word. He stands in the doorway. “Rácz wants you to know,” he tells the manager, “that if you try to screw him he will come up here and make your life hell. You see, everybody treats you like a piece of rubbish,” he adds with contempt and malice. “You’ve got only one way out: beg him to forgive you.”
The manager sits up with a jerk.
“Rácz wants you to come over to him in the lobby on your hands and knees and beg for his forgiveness in front of everyone.”
“Never!” the manager says in anger. “Apologize politely, admit a mistake was made — yes. But that kind of a circus show…”
“But you’re a circus act, anyway!” Ďula says angrily. “How do you think people see you?”
The manager angrily puts his fat fingers in his ears. He curls his upper lip.
Ďula leaves.
The manager is on the lookout in the doorway. When the lawyer passes by, he addresses him in a friendly manner. He believes the lawyer will help him. For years the manager has covered up the lawyer’s deals. But the lawyer is fearful.
“Are you out of your mind?” he bursts out. “Do you think I want to end up like you? Kindly don’t talk to me. After a while, when the air’s clear, I may drop by. That’s all I can do for you at the moment. We’ll see what happens in the future.” The lawyer looks around. “Well, clear off,” he tells the manager impatiently. “We might be seen together and I’d have problems I don’t need.”
The lawyer hurries off. Yes, his prediction has come true. The manager’s gone to pieces. In effect, the lawyer runs the hotel now. He should be made the real manager. That would be something! It would become the lawyer’s gold mine. He knows so many tricks with the paper-work that he’d be a millionaire in a year. Yes, the lawyer realises, the time has come to organize an election for the manager’s job. That would be the lawyer’s great chance. Were it not for Rácz. The lawyer is apprehensive. What if Rácz has the same ambition? The lawyer calls for an election, and the staff elects Rácz instead! Or if not Rácz, someone else who’ll run things on Rácz’s behalf. No, Rácz will have to be rendered harmless, the lawyer decides. Rácz has gone too far.
The manager is sitting in the tent in his office and reflects. He can’t fire Rácz. He can’t do anything. The manager is lost. If his wife and her lover don’t take pity on him, by spring he’ll freeze to death — either freeze, or go mad. He can’t last much longer.
* * *
Rácz sometimes comes to check on the gypsies locked up in the boiler-room. They have resigned themselves to their fate. They don’t try to escape any more; it’s impossible. The bars are solid. When they see Rácz, they work like mad. They’re afraid of him. They are strong only in a mob. As individuals, they are against violence. They fear physical pain. The pump wheels turn round and round. Rácz checks to see that the bearings don’t overheat. He checks the pressure and the temperature. If anything is out of order, the gypsies go without food for a day. After his inspection, Rácz calmly leaves. Ďula shuts the door and slowly turns all the complicated locks.
Rácz spends most of his day in the hotel. He often sits in an armchair in the lobby, pretending to sleep. That’s an illusion: despite his almost closed eyelids, he keeps a watchful eye on his surroundings. Nothing escapes him. The new guests report to him. They agree a price on the spot. Rácz’s calculation of the price depends on how a guest is dressed. The better they’re dressed, the higher the price. If a guest refuses to pay, Rácz goes down to the boiler-room and turns off the heating. The non-payer pays up after the other guests, who’ve paid, force him to. The guests are dismayed, but they can’t do anything about it. They know nothing about life in this country. They don’t know if it’s normal or not. But nobody complains. They fear Rácz’s revenge.
Rácz spends his evenings in the Ambassador cabaret bar. He sits at the bar and drinks cocktails that he has taken a liking to, or, when in company, he takes a table close to the stage. In that case Silvia, Edita, and sometimes their friend, Wanda the Trucker, keep him company. Ďula, his sidekick, is always there, as he loves to drink and eat for free. His mouth full, he laughs with gratitude at Rácz’s rough and clumsy attempts at jokes. Rácz sometimes forces him to do tricks; for example, he might ask him to drink a litre of cold water in one gulp, or to climb under the table with a schnitzel in his mouth. Ďula obediently does as he is told, and the stoker applauds by strumming his fingers on Ďula’s ears, a sign of praise among senior conscripts in the army, or so Rácz solemnly says.
All of this time, Rácz never forgets his duties. In the middle of all the fun he gets up, takes Ďula along and they vanish somewhere for half an hour. Anyone who followed them through the dark passage into the boiler-room courtyard, would see them move barrels of ash and empty them onto a big heap. Rácz could never let the gypsies do this job. He’d be afraid that they’d make a run for it. So while this job is being done, both Berki and Šípoš are locked in the cubbyhole.
Rácz urinates onto the ashes and remembers times past. The gloomy courtyard and the scarcity of public toilets always tempted passers-by who were bursting to relieve themselves then and there. Donáth used to battle against them, he hated them. He divided them into two groups: The pissers and the shitters. For the old man the pissers were a socially less objectionable group than the shitters. The urine usually evaporated and only a pervasive smell remained. It couldn’t be detected down in the boiler-room. The shitters left behind a tangible and often very substantial artefact, and that drove Donáth into a frenzy. Spying through the keyhole, Donáth and Rácz would often keep a lookout from the boiler-room metal door. They waited for the moment when the shitter dropped his trousers, about to do his business. The moment the artefact seemed to be ready, Rácz, armed with a pickaxe handle, would fly through the door, followed by Donáth. The offender would have to deposit the still warm artefact into a skip with his bare hands and then use his shirt or other piece of clothing to wipe where he’d deposited it. “No, we don’t have any water,” the old man would answer the inevitable question from offenders who’d been caught and taught a lesson.
Women, often decently dressed and of educated appearance, who usually entered the dark courtyard quietly, formed a quite distinct group. They would carefully look around and in a flash would get rid of a sanitary towel often right in front of the boiler-room. They’d often use the occasion to have a loud pee. “Madam! You’ve forgotten something!” Donáth would call out after a woman hurrying out of the courtyard, waving a sanitary towel skewered on a poker at her.
Donáth also had a trick he played on desperate lovers who couldn’t wait and, misled by the remoteness and apparent peacefulness, decided to do it in the dark courtyard. When their audible moans betrayed them at the height of their passion, the old man would turn on all the lights and, coughing his dry cough, would come out into the courtyard lit by blinding neon lights. “Couldn’t you screw somewhere else? Who’s supposed to listen to this? People like to sleep here!”
Only the vomiters didn’t bother him that much. After every night, but mostly on Fridays, in the area around the Hotel Ambassador, including the courtyard, a few sizeable dried up star-like objects, a mixture of alcohol, food, and gastric juices, appeared, but Donáth just shrugged. “Can’t be helped,” he used to say. “People throw up because they have to. It’s no problem. A little bit of rain will wash it away.”