Was an axe stuck in my back.
The manager pauses, then stops playing. He is listening to the noises from the suite. The copulatory creaking stops for a while. He hears muffled talking. Then the creaking resumes, much more energetically and faster. The manager sings:
My love was true
My love was good
And for that love of mine
I now lie in my grave.
I did not know that today
Is not like yesterday,
And this mistake of mine
Has sent me to my grave
The other rooms are quiet. The hotel guests think that this is another of the stoker’s quirks. Nobody wants to confront him, so they prefer to lie awake and quietly wait for it to end. His hands trembling, the manager draws air into his accordion with a mixture of stage fright and excitement; he wets his lips and goes on singing:
Mother, dear Mother,
Do not cry so much.
I have suffered in the world,
In the grave I’ll rest.
The door of the suite opens violently and Rácz himself appears on the threshold. The manager grows ten inches smaller.
“Who dares to do this?” the stoker shouts and raises his clenched fist like an anti-tank grenade. “Who’s so mad they dare to disturb Rácz?” he asks, but instead of an answer, the manager produces only a monotonous, muffled whimper that seems to come from outside the building. “Who is laughing at Rácz? Who’s trying to take the piss?” And silently deliberating for a moment, the stoker punches the wall. The hotel shakes down to its foundations and the corridor lights flicker. The manager shrinks four more inches. Rácz approaches him and with his steel fingers grabs him by the neck like a rabbit. The manager lets himself be taken silently to the stairwell. Here the stoker stops and pushes him down head first. Instantly, the manager finds himself a floor lower. The stairs down are littered with broken pieces of his instruments. “Once more!” Rácz warns him, “ONCE MORE!” He doesn’t seem to have recognized the manager in disguise. Rácz turns around, enters his suite and slams the door behind him.
The manager stops pretending to be unconscious. He struggles to his feet and feels his arms and legs. He takes the broken and bent drum off his back. He gasps for breath out of sheer mortification and humiliation.
“What’s the meaning of this mess?” A cleaner attacks him. She’s just arrived at work by the first bus and looks down at the manager. “That’s what men would like: make a pigsty everywhere they go! Then women have to come and clean it up, put up with it! Do women exist just for cleaning? Don’t women have any rights? Women want a life, too! Women aren’t work robots! Well, women know about cleaning, of course. But if someone deliberately makes a filthy mess, then he can clean up after himself. Right now, at the double!”
The manager feels his chin and finds that his false beard has come off. He lost his dark glasses when he fell.
“Ah, the manager,” the cleaner notes with joy. “Here’s a broom! At the double! Then you’ll get a bucket and mop. The stairs have to shine!”
Through the windows a chilly and sharp winter sun shines faintly. The rubbish men are banging about in the yard. Rácz peacefully snorts in his sleep, which is always deep a couple of hours before he wakes. In the yellow snow in front of the kitchen are grey boxes of bread and pastries, stacked on top of each other. In the parking lot are barrels of water where the fish are kept. Here and there, a silver fish back surfaces just for a second and vanishes with a powerful splash in the freezing water. The porter Torontál is at his post near the receptionist’s desk and loyally waits for suitcase handles to grab. The receptionist has made his last coffee. He rubs his sleepy eyes, and waits for the morning shift to relieve him. The hotel rooms are dead to the world. Everyone is asleep. The manager is still cleaning up. The remnants of the accordion and the drum had to be taken out to the skip. He’s swept the stairs and corridor, washed them, and now he’s waxing them.
The cleaner is having a coffee in her broom cupboard. Now and then she checks up on him.
“A little bit harder on this spot,” she tells him strictly. “Can’t the manager see that dirt?”
The guests have woken up. Phones ring in the kitchen. Everybody wants breakfast in bed. The waiters have a last puff of their cigarettes, drink up their coffee, adjust their bow ties and grab their trays or trolleys. Nobody uses the lifts now. They all take the stairs on purpose. As soon as the manager has polished the stairs to the cleaner’s satisfaction, stiff-necked waiters walk on them with their dirty shoes. The manager has to clean them all over again. He is embarrassed and puts his false beard and dark glasses back on so that they won’t recognize him. The cleaner has finished her coffee, morning cigarette and newspaper; she now stands over the manager, watching his every move. She tells everyone walking up or down: “This is the manager! I caught him making a mess on the stairs. Women are not here to clean all the time. Men can do something, as well. Women need peace and quiet, too. Carry on walking, he can polish them again!”
The manager waxes the stairs again. He forces his tears out by squeezing his eyes shut. When he’s finished, he stands by the window and lets people pass, so that he can continue his work with the facial expression of Christ scourged. The cleaner has left long ago, but the manager still goes on working. It is only around noon that he is struck by the sudden silence in the hall. He furtively approaches the door of the cleaner’s cupboard, and finds it locked. Then the manager gathers up the courage and runs to his office like a hunted animal. He clambers into the tent and instantly falls asleep.
* * *
Video Urban has gone right off money-changing. He’s had his fingers burned. Morning after morning he’d been driving to the fields across the river, to the border crossing and waiting for the orange, toxic green, and loud red buses, getting into them and relieving shopping-crazed westerners of their deutschmark, schillings, and dollars. Rácz gave up hope of finding the source of Urban’s sudden wealth. He went on buying Urban’s currency without further comment; after all, he made money out of it too. Wealthy peasants who longed to buy a used car, TV, video etc in Austria came running to Rácz, ready to pay outrageous prices for currency.
Disaster struck Urban one chilly, but rare sunny day, when everything seemed to be going like clockwork. A huge bus full of Austrian tourists stopped in a lay-by after customs, and in stepped Urban in a cheerful festive mood. He was making his way towards the back of the bus, taking schillings left and right from outstretched hands, counting and handing back one-thousand and five-hundred crown bills from a fat wad fastened with a red elastic when, at the end of the bus, he came face to face with two plain-clothes police ID cards held out by two shyly smiling slender youths. Dressed in windcheaters and jeans, they looked ordinary.
“No hysterics, please,” one of them said politely and got up with a sigh. “Let’s go,” he said, gently pushing Urban towards the exit.
“No funny business, OK?” said the other one, shouting hysterically, and, jumping up, he grabbed Urban by the collar and thrust him down on the floor. He kneeled over him and checked him for weapons. He found Urban’s wallet and put it in his pocket. “He hasn’t got a gun,” he shouted. “Go, go!” He pushed Urban out.
Urban got off the bus with his hands up.
“Make him keep his hands behind his head!” the undercover policeman was shouting, when suddenly a huge hand-gun appeared in his hand out of nowhere.