Fearfully, Eržika clings to Rácz’s excitement. “Brrr, it’s cold,” she says, her speech blurred. “It’s cold in here!”
But Rácz isn’t listening to her now. He pushes her down into the hay and hungrily hurls himself on her.
“No! No!” Eržika tries to fight him off and keeps her knees together with all her strength.
Rácz puts his hand under her dress. In one powerful move he rips off her antediluvian drawers and throws them behind him. Then he forces her legs apart. He puts his weight on one of her knees and tries to pry away the other one with his hand. His muscles creak with the effort. He shoves his own thigh into the gap. Then he unzips his damp fly and takes out his member. When he lays it on Eržika’s bare thigh, the girl shrieks with fear.
“Shut your mouth, stupid!” Rácz hisses. He pushes his whole body up higher. Eržika shrieks once more. Outside, the dogs start to bark. Rácz slaps her face.
“Rácz isn’t used to anyone resisting him,” he says hoarsely.
He forces himself into Eržika’s limp body and sighs with relief. Eržika’s teeth chatter with cold. “Does it hurt?” Rácz barks impatiently. Eržika nods. She lies motionless, biting her tongue. Rácz begins to move. He speeds up. Eržika lies like a corpse. When Rácz is about to come, he frees himself from between his fiancée’s thighs. He uses his hand to ejaculate powerfully at precise intervals. “Ah, ah, ah,” he comes violently and regularly. Then he falls into the hay.
Eržika sits up heavily and takes a handful of hay to wipe the still hot sperm from her breasts, face, and hair. Rácz wipes himself on her dress. His mind is now working normally. His last powerful shot of semen seems to have cleansed his blood of all desire and excitement. It’s all clear to him now. His relatives stole his inheritance and, worse, then claimed they were doing him a favour; Kišš offered his daughter to proud Feri Bartaloš the moment Rácz was out of the village and then claimed he was doing him a favour. Eržika is a stupid village goose. And she’s fat. Rácz has very different women in the city. They may be old hags, in their forties, even fifties, but when they put on make-up and dress up, any man gets a hard-on like a candle. And Eržika? Not even twenty. When she’s thirty, she’ll be twice as fat as now. She’ll bear him three children and then lose her looks. Until the day she dies, she’ll wear two sets of clothes: white butcher’s shop-assistant overalls and a flowery dress at home. And she’ll never stop chewing sunflower seeds, like her mother, until Rácz itches to slap her. No, Rácz has a brighter future ahead of him! No, he doesn’t have scrubbers like Silvia in mind. One day he’ll kick her out on her arse, too. When he’s fed up with her. No, he doesn’t mean her. Rácz will find himself a city girl, a young girl who likes him. Is it really so hard to like a man like Rácz?
Eržika wants to be kissed. She offers him her half-open mouth and closes her eyes. Rácz pushes her away.
Eržika opens her eyes. “So that’s what you are!”
“What am I?” Rácz clenches his fists threateningly.
“Was that what you wanted?” Eržika bursts out crying. “You swine!” Her round face distorts itself into a grimace like a Chinese idol’s. Rácz has never seen a Chinese idol, but he still feels an elemental revulsion for Eržika. He moves further away from his fiancée to avoid being polluted by her tears and snivelling.
“You weren’t even a virgin!” Rácz says in disgust. “No hymen. No blood. Whore! Who knows who you’ve slept with while Rácz slaved for you in the city. The whole village? Half the village? Or Feri Bartaloš? Yes, of course, him!” Rácz jumps up and theatrically beats his brow. How could he not have seen it! Feri Bartaloš was her supposed fiancé, after all. Well then, Rácz can see what “supposed” means! Rácz’s future wife has to be a virgin! He really wants to give her a slap. But he has to watch out. When he hits someone, it shows. He doesn’t want to end up in gaol. As it is, he is a laughing stock. “Shit!” Rácz wildly kicks the barn door open and quickly strides towards the house.
“Took a fancy to my money, did you, Mr. Kišš?” Rácz shouts into Kišš’s ear. Kišš is vomiting by the gate. The butcher’s watery eyes turn to him and he says a few blurred words. He’s drunk; he can’t take anything in. Kišš’s house is brightly lit. Rácz bursts in. “Ďula,” he shouts in a wild, alien voice. “ĎULA!” Rácz repeats when he gets no reply.
“What is it, boss?” Ďula appears in the door to the kitchen, a glass of champagne in his hand. His shirt is pulled out of his trousers; he’s dishevelled and dirty. He staggers, and smiles stupidly.
Rácz is enraged. He knocks the glass out of Ďula’s hand. The glass smashes. “We’re leaving!” Rácz orders.
“Where to?” Ďula asks, not comprehending.
“Home! To the hotel, you fool!” Rácz says.
“But I’ve been drinking,” says Ďula.
“I don’t care,” says Rácz. “Get going! Out!”
Ďula looks around helplessly, but everybody is drunk, singing songs. Nobody pays attention to Rácz and Ďula. “You’ll sober up on the way,” Rácz declares. “Let’s just get out of here!” Ďula watches him helplessly. “Move it, come on, move it!” Rácz yells at him and pushes him towards the door.
The Renault minibus, its lights off, starts jerkily and rushes across Kišš’s front yard. It jumps ahead and then backs until it faces the gate, which no one has opened. Ďula puts it in second and steps on the gas. He turns on the lights. In the light is Eržika, her arms spread out, running toward the minibus, as if she wanted to stop Rácz.
“Out of the way, you snake!” Rácz screams at her through the side window. “Put your foot down!” he orders.
However, Ďula veers to avoid Eržika; the vehicle knocks down the gate and a section of the fence and gets onto the dark street. Ďula changes gear. The van roars through the sleeping village, occasionally hitting a fence at speed, or slipping into the ditch.
Rácz says nothing. He lights a cigarette. A few times he imagines he can see the silhouette of a man on horseback, but when they get nearer, it turns out to be a grotesquely shaped roadside bush, or sometimes nothing at all.
* * *
“Babylon!” A demented man on the pavement shouts, lifting his gaunt arms above his head. “The whore of Babylon!” he repeats in a stern voice.
Wanda the Trucker, clinging to an elderly Austrian, aims her long legs towards his white Mercedes, parked at the pavement in front of the hotel. Nobody pays attention to the grimy demented hermit flailing his arms, shouting, “Hosanna, I say unto you, the end is near! There is still time to repent!”
The passers-by look at him, but nobody sees that this demented preacher was once the placid, corpulent Freddy Piggybank. Gaunt, hairy, and covered in the filth of many weeks, Freddy has changed so much that he is unrecognizable. After his car park was turned into a Christmas market, Piggybank got drunk and wrecked the Ambassador Bar. Then every day he came to the hotel entrance, watching with stupefied silent reproval the goings-on in what had been his place of work. He greedily and angrily calculated how much money he’d lost. The fishmongers selling carp, the greengrocers, and the bartenders in their jerry-built wooden booths liked it near the hotel. Even after their lease expired they stayed put in the parking lot, and the long queues of customers supported their cause. They offered the town council much more rent than Freddy could afford. There were no two ways about it: Piggybank was out on the street. This personal tragedy took Freddy’s breath away and for some time he was on the verge of apoplexy. Freddy Piggybank had paid his rent and taxes like an honest man. He’d never harmed anyone. And what did he get in return? For a while he tried to raise money by charging drivers to park at the hotel pavement, but the cops put a stop to that. They threatened him with gaol, if he went on collecting money illegally. “Well then, give me back my car park,” the distressed pavement attendant retorted. The cops grabbed their truncheons and pointed them at Freddy, their necks straining and their eyebrows raised, as a sign of lively interest in his arguments. Instead of standing up for himself, the dismayed cowardly attendant avoided their gaze and left the scene in ill-concealed haste.