a baby face is propping up a shelf laden with stale desserts and a few bottles of expensive champagne while painting her fingernails. On the drinkers’ side of the counter leans a stocky waitress, cigarette in one hand and a dime novel in the other, licking her lips in excitement every time she turns the page. On the walls a ring of dusty lamps serves for atmosphere. “A single, blended,” says Petrina and leans on the counter next to his companion. The waitress doesn’t even look up from her book. “And a Silver Kossuth,” adds Irimiás. The girl behind the bar, clearly bored, levers herself away from the shelf, carefully puts down the bottle of nail polish, and pours out the drinks, her movements slow and sluggish, only taking the odd glance at what she is doing, then pushes one towards Irimiás. “Seven-seventy,” she drawls. But neither man moves. Irimiás looks into the girl’s face and their eyes meet. “The order was for a single!” he growls. The girl quickly looks away and fills two more glasses. “Sorry!” she says, a little abashed. “And I seem to remember ordering a pack of cigarettes too,” Irimiás continues in a low voice. “Eleven-ninety,” the girl gabbles, glancing over at her colleague who is stifling a giggle and waves at her to leave off. Too late. “What’s so funny?” All eyes are fixed on them. The smile freezes on the waitress’s face, she nervously adjusts her bra strap through her apron then shrugs. Suddenly everything has fallen quiet. Next to the window opening onto the streets sits a fat man in a bus driver’s cap: he watches Irimiás in astonishment then quickly finishes his piccolo and clumsily slams the glass down on the table. “Excuse me. .” he stutters, seeing how everyone is looking at him. And at that point, one cannot quite tell from where, a gentle humming begins. Everyone is breathlessly watching everyone else because for a moment it seems as though it is a person, a living person doing the humming. They steal glances at each other: the humming becomes a tad louder. Irimiás raises his glass then slowly puts it down again. “Is someone humming here?” he mutters in irritation. “Is someone making a joke?! What the hell is it? A machine? Or, or might it be. . the lamps? No, it is a person after all. Could it be that old bat by the toilets? Or that asshole over there in the gym shoes? What is this? Some kind of dissent?” Then it suddenly stops. Now there’s only the silence, the suspicious glances. The glass is trembling in Irimiás’s hand; Petrina is nervously drumming on the counter. Everyone is sitting still, looking down, no one dares move. The old woman at the washrooms tugs the sleeve of the waitress. “Should we call the police?” The girl behind the bar can’t stop giggling out of sheer nervousness so, to bring things to a head, she quickly turns on the tap in the sink and begins making a noise with the beer glasses. “We will blow them all up,” says Irimiás in a strangled voice, then repeats it in a ringing bass: “We’ll blow up the lot of them. We’ll blow them up one by one. Cowards! Worms!” he turns to Petrina. “One stick of dynamite per jacket! That one there,” he indicates someone behind him with his thumb, “will get one stuffed in his pocket. That one,” he continues, glancing towards the fire, “will find one under his pillow. There’ll be bombs up chimney-flues, under doormats, bombs hung from chandeliers, bombs stuffed up their assholes!” The girl behind the bar and the waitress move closer to each other for comfort at the end of the counter. The patrons stare at each other in fright. Petrina weighs them up, his eyes full of hatred. “Blow up their bridges. Their houses. The whole town. The parks. Their mornings. Their mail. One by one, we’ll do it properly, everything in the proper order. .” Irimiás purses his lips and blows out smoke, pushing his glass to and fro in pools of beer. “Because one has to finish what one has started.” “True enough, no point in shilly-shallying,” Petrina nods furiously: “We’ll bomb them in stages!” “All the towns. One after the other!” Irimiás continues as if in a dream. “The villages. The remotest little shack!” “Boom! Boom! Boom!” cries Petrina, waving his arms about: “You hear! Then BLAAM! The end, gentlemen.” He pulls a twenty from his pocket, throws it down on the counter right in the middle of a pool of beer, the paper slowly drawing the liquid up. Irimiás too moves away from the bar and opens the door but then turns back. “A couple of days, that’s all you have left! Irimiás will blow you to pieces!” he spits out by way of parting, curls his lip and, by way of a grand finale, runs his gaze slowly over the terrified larval faces. The stench of sewers mixed with mud, puddles, the smell of the odd crack of lightning, wind tugging at tiles, power lines, empty nests; the stifling heat behind low ill-fitting windows. . impatient, annoyed half-words of lovers embracing. . demanding wails of babies, their cries sliding off into the tin-smell of dusk; streets pliable, parks soaked to their roots lying obedient to the rain, bare oaks, half-broken dry flowers, scorched grass all prostrate, humbled by the storm, sacrifices strewn at the executioner’s feet. Petrina wheezes at Irimiás’s heels. “Are we going to see Steigerwald?” But his companion does not hear him. He has turned up the collar of his houndstooth coat, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, his head raised, and is hurrying blindly from street to street, never slowing, never looking back, his soaked cigarette drooping from his mouth, though he doesn’t even notice it, while Petrina continues to curse the world with an inexhaustible supply of imprecations, his bow legs buckling every so often and, when he falls twenty paces behind Irimiás, vainly shouting after him (“Hey! Wait for me! Don’t be in such a rush! What am I, a cow in a stampede?”) though the other pays no attention at all and, to make matters worse, he treads in a puddle up to his ankles, gives a great puff, leans against the wall of a house and mutters “I can’t keep up with this. .” But, after a couple of minutes, Irimiás reappears, his wet hair hanging over his eyes, his pointed bright-yellow shoes caked in mud. Water drips off Petrina. “Look at these,” he says pointing to his ears, “Gooseflesh, frozen. .” Irimiás nods reluctantly, clears his throat and says, “We’re going to the estate.” Petrina stares at him, his eyes popping out. “What. .? Now?! The two of us?! To the estate?!” Irimiás pulls another cigarette from the pack, lights it and quickly blows the smoke out. “Yes. Right now.” Petrina leans against the wall. “Listen here, old friend, master, savior, slave driver! You’ll be the death of me! I am frozen through, I’m hungry, I want to find somewhere warm where I can dry out and eat and I have no desire at all, God knows, to tramp out to the estate in this foul weather, in fact I am quite disinclined to follow you, to run after you like a lunatic, damn your already damned soul! Damn it!” Irimiás gives a wave and replies indifferently, “If you don’t want to stay with me go where you please.” And he is gone. “Where are you going? Where are you off to now?” Petrina shouts after him in anger, setting off to follow him. “Where would you go without me?. . Stop for a second. Come on!” The rain eases off a little as they leave the town. Night descends. No stars, no moon. At the Elek crossroads, a hundred yards ahead of them, a shadow sways; only later do they discover it is a man in a trenchcoat; he enters a field and the darkness swallows him. On either side of the highway there are gloomy patches of woodland as far as the eye can see, mud covering everything and, since the fading light blurs all clear outlines, consuming all traces of color, stable forms begin to move while things that should move stand as if petrified, so the whole highway is like a strange vessel run aground, idling and rocking on a muddy ocean. Not a bird is stirring to leave its mark on the sky that has hardened to a solid mass that, like a morning mist, hovers above the ground, only a solitary frightened deer rises and sinks in the distance — as if the mud itself were breathing — preparing to flee in the far distance. “Dear God!” Petrina sighs. “When I think it will be morning before we get there I get cramp in my legs! Why didn’t we ask Steigerwald if we could borrow his truck? And that coat too! What am I? A circus strongman??!” Irimiás stops, puts his foot up on a milestone, pulls out a cigarette, they both take one, and light them using their hands as shelter. “Can I ask you something, killer?” “What?” “Why are we going to the estate?” “Why? Have you anywhere to sleep? Do you have anything to eat? Money? Either you stop your eternal whining or I strangle you.” “OK. Fine. I understand, this much anyway. But tomorrow we got to go back, haven’t we?” Irimiás grinds his teeth but says nothing. Petrina gives another sigh. “Look friend, you really could have thought of something else with that clever head of yours! I don’t want to stay with those people the way I am. I can’t stand being in one place. Petrina was born under open skies, that’s where he has lived all his life and that’s where he’ll die.” Irimiás dismisses him with a bitter gesture: “We’re in the shit, friend. There’s nothing we can do about that for a while. We have to stay with them.” Petrina wrings his hands. “Master! Please don’t say things like that! My heart is already pounding.” “OK, OK, don’t crap in your pants. We’ll take their money then we’ll move on. We’ll manage somehow. .” They set off again. “You think they have money?” Petrina asks anxiously. “Peasants always have something.” They proceed without speaking, mile after mile, they must be roughly half way between the turn-off and the local bar; occasionally a star twinkles in front of them only to vanish again in the dense dark; sometimes the moon shines through the mist and, like the two exhausted figures on the paved road below, escapes with them across the celestial battlefield, pushing its way past every obstacle towards its target, right until dawn. “I wonder what the bumpkins will say when they see us.” “It’ll be surprise,” Irimiás replies over his shoulder. Petrina picks up the pace. “What makes you think they’ll be there at all?” he asks in his anxiety. “I figure they’ll have made tracks ages ago. They must have that much intelligence.” “Intelligence?” grins Irimiás. “Them? Servants is what they were and that’s what they’ll remain until they die. They’ll be sitting in the kitchen, shitting themselves in the corner, taking the odd look out of the window to see what the others are doing. I know these people like the back of my hand.” “I don’t know how you can be so sure of that, friend,” says Petrina. “My hunch is that there won’t be anyone there. Empty houses, the tiles fallen or stolen, at best one or two starved rats in the mill. .” “No-o-o,” Irimiás confidently retorts. “They’ll be sitting in exactly the same place, on the same filthy stools, stuffing themselves with the same filthy spuds and paprika every night, having no idea what’s happened. They’ll be eyeing each other suspiciously, only breaking the silence to belch. They are waiting. They’re waiting patiently, like the long-suffering lot they are, in the firm conviction that someone has conned them. They are waiting, belly to the ground, like cats at pig-killing time, hoping for scraps. They are like servants that work at a castle where the master has shot himself: they hang around at an utter loss as to what to do. .” “Enough poetry, boss, I am terrified enough already!” Petrina tries to calm himself while pressing his rumbling stomach. But Irimiás pays him no attention, he’s on a roll. “They are slaves who have lost their master but can’t live without what they call pride, honor and courage. That’s what keeps their souls in place even if at the back of their thick skulls they sense these qualities aren’t their own, that they’ve simply enjoyed living in the shadow of their masters. .” “Enough,” Petrina groans and rubs his eyes because the water keeps running down his flat forehead: “Look, don’t be cross, but I just can’t bear listening to such stuff right now!. . You can tell me all about them tomorrow, for now I’d sooner you talked about a good steaming bowl of bean soup!” But Irimiás ignores this too and goes on undisturbed. “Then, wherever the shadow falls they follow, like a flock of sheep, because they can’t do without a shadow, just as they can’t do without pomp and splendor either (“For God’s sake! Cut it out old man, please!. .” Petrina cries in his agony), they’ll do anything not to be left alone with the remnants of pomp and splendor, because when they are left alone they go mad: like mad dogs they fall on whatever remains and tear it to bits. Give them a well-heated room, a cauldron bubbling with paprika stew, a few dogs, and they’ll be dancing on the table every night, and even happier under warm bedclothes, panting away, with a tasty piece of the neighbor’s stout wife to tuck into. . Are you listening to me Petrina?” “Ayayay,” the other sighs in reply and adds in hope: “Why? Have you finished?” By now they can see the blown-over fences of the roadside houses, the tumbledown shed, the rusty water tank, when right beside them, a hoarse voice calls them from behind a high stack of weeds: “Wait! It’s me”” A twelve- to thirteen-year-old boy, completely chilled and soaked to the bone, wearing trousers rolled up to the knee rushes towards them, drenched, trembling, his eyes shining. Petrina is the first to recognize him. “So it’s you. .? What are you doing here, you little good-for-nothing!?” “I’ve been hiding here for hours…” he announces with pride, and quickly looks down. His long hair hangs in knots over his spotty face, a cigarette glowing between his bent fingers. Irimiás takes patient stock of the boy who steals the odd look at him but immediately lowers his eyes again. “So what do you want?” Petrina quizzes him, shaking his head. The boy steals another glance at Irimiás. “You promised. .” he starts, stutters and stops, “that. . that if. .” “Come on boy, spit it out!” Irimiás hassles him. “That if I told people that you were. .” the boy finally blurts out kicking the ground all the while,”. . dead, then you’d fix me up with Mrs. Schmidt. .” Petrina pulls the boy’s ear and snaps at him: “What’s this? No sooner hatched and out of the egg but you already want to climb up ladies’ skirts, you little scoundrel! What next?!” The boy frees himself and shouts, his eyes flashing in anger. “I tell you what you should be pulling, you old goat. The skin off your dick!” If Irimiás did not intervene there’d be a fight. “Enough!” he bellows. “How did you know we were on the way?” The boy stands a careful distance from Petrina, rubbing his ear. “That’s my business. It doesn’t matter anyway. . Everyone knows by now. The driver told them.” Petrina is cursing, looking up at the sky but Irimiás gestures for him to be quiet (“Use your brains! Leave him alone!”) and turns to the boy: “What driver?” “Kelemen. He lives by the Elek turning, that’s where he saw you.” “Kelemen? He’s become a bus driver?” “Yeah, since spring, on the cross-country route. But the bus isn’t in service at the moment so he has time to loaf around. .” “OK,” says Irimiás and sets off. The boy hurries to keep pace with him. “I did what you asked me to do.. I hope you’ll keep your part of. .” “I generally keep my promises,” Irimiás answers coolly. The boy follows him like a shadow; sometimes he catches up with him and squints up at his face then falls behind again. Petrina trails still further behind, a long way back, and though they can’t make out his voice they are aware he is continually cursing the ceaseless rain, the mud, the boy, and the world at large (“to hell with it all!”) “I still have the photograph!” says the boy some two hundred yards on. But Irimiás does not hear him or pretends not to have heard, his head raised high he is striding down the middle of the road, slicing the darkness with his hooked nose and sharp chin. The kid tries again: “Don’t you want to see the photograph?” Irimiás turns slowly to look at him