se, take one,” answered one of them. “It’s there, by your feet, next to you.” The doctor lit it and slowly blew out the smoke. “The rain, you know,” one of the girls explained. “It’s what Mari and I were grumbling about just now: no work alas, business is bad” — she gave a hoarse laugh — “so, you know, we’re stuck here.” The doctor turned to warm his side. He had not met the two Horgos girls since he had dismissed the elder one. He knew they spent the day at the mill, indifferently waiting for a “customer” to appear or for the landlord to summon them. They rarely ventured onto the estate. “We didn’t think it worthwhile to wait,” the elder Horgos girl continued. “There are days, you know, when they turn up one after the other, and other days when there’s no visitors, nothing happens and we just sit here. There are times when we almost leap on each other, the two of us, it’s so cold. And it’s scary being here by ourselves. . ” The younger Horgos girl gave a raucous laugh. “Oh we’re so scared!” and lisped, like a little girl, “it’s horrible here, just the two of us.” This elicited a brief shriek from both of them. “May I take another cigarette?” the doctor grumbled. “Take one, of course you may take one, why should I say no, especially to you?!” The younger one was falling about with still more laughter and, imitating her sister’s voice, repeated, “Why should I say no, especially to you! That’s good, that’s well said!” Eventually they stopped their giggling and stared, exhausted, into the fire. The doctor was enjoying the heat and thought to stay a little longer, to dry out and warm up, then pull himself together and set out for the bar. He stared dozily into the fire, faintly whistling as he breathed in and out. The elder Horgos girl broke the silence. Her voice was tired, hoarse and bitter. “You know, I am over twenty now, and she will soon be twenty herself. When I think about it — and that’s what we were talking about just now when you turned up — I wonder where all this is leading us. A girl gets fed up. Have you any idea how much we can put away in savings? Can you imagine?! Ah, I could kill people sometimes!” The doctor gazed at the fire in silence. The younger Horgos girl stared indifferently straight ahead of her: her legs were spread and she was leaning back on her hands, nodding. “We have to support the little criminal, the idiot child Esti, not to metion mother, though she can’t do much apart from complain about this or that, or ask where we have stowed the money, and demand we give her the money, the money this and the money that — and what’s with them all!? Believe me, they are quite capable of robbing us of our last pair of panties! And as for us finally going into town and leaving this filthy hole, if you could only have heard the abuse hurled at us! What on earth did we think we were doing, blah, blah, blah?. . The fact is we are utterly fed up with this life, isn’t that right, Mari, haven’t we had enough of it?” The younger Horgos waved a bored hand. “Forget it! Don’t rock the boat! You either go or stay! You can’t say anyone is keeping you here.” Her older sister immediately rounded on her. “Yes, you’d like it if I pissed off, wouldn’t you? You’d do all right here by yourself! Well, that’s exactly why I’m not going! If I go, you go too!” Baby Horgos made an ugly face, “OK, but don’t moan so much, you’ll make me cry already!” Horgos the elder had a reply ready but could not get to the end of it because her words were lost in a volley of throaty coughing. “No sweat, Mari, there’ll be cash enough here today, cash by the sack full!” she broke the silence. “Just see what’s going to happen here pretty soon, just see if I’m not right!” The other turned to her, annoyed. “They should have been here ages ago. Something doesn’t smell right about this, that’s my feeling.” “Aah, leave off. Don’t bother your head about it. I know Kráner and all the rest. He’ll be here right enough, panting and chasing tail, the same as ever.” “You don’t imagine he’s going to cough up the lot? All that money?” The doctor raised his head. “What money?” he asked. The elder Horgos made an impatient gesture with her hand. “Forget it, doc, just sit there and make yourself warm, and don’t pay any attention to us.” So he sat a while longer then begged two more cigarettes and a dry match and started down the stairs. He got to the door without any trouble: the rain was slanting in through the gap. His headache was a little better and he no longer felt dizzy in the slightest, there was only the tightness in his chest that didn’t want to go away. His feet quickly grew accustomed to the dark and felt perfectly at home knowing which way to go along the path. He made rapid progress in view of his condition, only rarely brushing against a branch or some shrub; so he pressed forward, his head held to one side so the rain wouldn’t beat at it so hard. He stopped for a couple of minutes under the eaves of the shed before the weighbridge but soon went on in a fury, silence and darkness before and behind him. He cursed Mrs. Kráner aloud and dreamed up various forms of revenge all of which he immediately forgot. He was tired again and there were moments he felt he simply had to sit down somewhere or else he would collapse. He turned down the metalled road that led to the bar and decided not to stop until he’d got there. “It’s a hundred steps no more, that’s all that remain,” he chivvied himself. There was a hopeful light filtering from the bar door and through its tiny window, the one single point in the darkness to guide him. He was ridiculously close now yet it seemed the filtered light was not getting any closer but, rather, moving away from him. “It’s nothing, it will pass, I’m just not feeling well,” he declared and stopped for a moment. He looked up at the sky and the gale slammed a fistful of rain into his face: what he needed more than anything right now was help. But the weakness that suddenly overcame him left just as suddenly. He turned off the metalled roadway and there he was, right in front of the bar door, when a faint voice below him called out: “Mr. Doctor!” It was the youngest of the Horgos children, little Esti, clinging to his coat. Her straw-blonde hair and her cardigan hanging down to her ankles were completely soaked through. She hung her head but carried on clinging to him as though she were not doing it just to amuse herself. “Is that you, little Esti? What do you want?” The little girl made no reply. “What are you doing out here at this hour of the night?” The doctor was shocked for a moment then tried impatiently to free himself, but little Esti clung on to him as though her life depended on it and would not let him go. “Let go of me! What’s the matter with you! Where’s your mother?!” The doctor seized the girl who suddenly pulled her hand away only to grab hold of his sleeve and to continue standing there in silence, looking down at the ground. The doctor nervously struck her on the arm to free himself but stumbled on the mud scraper and, however he waved his arms, finished up full length in the mud. The little girl was frightened and ran to the bar window, watching him, ready to run as the vast body rose and moved towards her. “Come here. Come here at once!” Esti leaned against the windowsill then pushed away and ran off down the metalled road on little duck feet. “That’s all I need!” the doctor muttered furiously to himself, then shouted after the little girl. “That’s all I needed! Where are you rushing off to?! Stop now, stop! Come back here at once!” He stood before the bar door not knowing what to do, to go about his errand or to go after the child. “Her mother is in there drinking, her sisters are whoring at the mill, her brother, well. . who knows which store he is robbing in town right at this minute, and she is running around in the rain with only a thin dress on. . the sky should fall in on the lot of them!” He stepped onto the metalled road and shouted out in the darkness. “Esti! I won’t harm you! Have you gone mad?! Come back here at once!” There was no answer. He set off after her and cursed himself for leaving his house in the first place. He was soaked to the skin, he wasn’t feeling well anyway, and now this half-wit clinging child!. . He felt too much had happened to him since he stepped out of his home and that everything was now mixed up in his head. Bitterly, he decided that all the order he had patiently, painstakingly constructed over the years was proving highly fragile, and it gave him even more pain to realize that he himself — despite his big strong constitution — was also on the verge of collapse: look, just one short walk to the bar (“And I took a rest too!”) which really was no great distance, and here he was, out of breath, tight in the chest, his legs weak and all strength gone from his body. And the worst thing was that he had been rushing round mindlessly, swept this way and that without the faintest idea why he should be pelting like a lunatic after a child down the metalled road in the driving rain. He shouted one last time in the direction the child might have been going then stopped, furious, admitting he’d never catch her anyway. It was high time he pulled himself together. He turned back and was astounded to observe that he seemed to have moved a long way from the bar. He started toward it but after a couple of steps the whole world went dark in an instant and he felt his legs sliding in the mud; for a brief moment he was aware that he was falling to the ground and rolling somewhere, then, finally, he lost consciousness. It took him a lot of effort and a long time to come to himself. He couldn’t remember how he had got here. His mouth was full of mud and the earthy taste suddenly made him feel sick. His coat too was covered in mud, his legs had stiffened because of the cold and damp but curiously enough the three cigarettes he had begged from the Horgos girls, that he was firmly gripping in his fist so they should not get wet, were perfectly intact. He quickly tucked them back in his pocket and tried to stand up. His legs, however, kept slipping on the sides of the muddy ditch and it was only after a sustained effort that he managed to get back on the proper road. “My heart! My heart!” The thought flashed through his mind and he grabbed at his chest in fear. He felt extremely weak and he knew he had to get to the hospital as quickly as he could. But the rain made that impossible: ever new waves of it were beating down at an angle to the road with unrelenting power. “I must rest. Find a tree. . or go on to the bar? No, I have to rest somewhere.” He left the road and took shelter under a nearby old acacia. He drew his legs under him so he shouldn’t have to sit directly on the ground. He tried hard not to think about anything, but stared stiffly ahead of him. A few minutes passed like this, or it might have been hours, he couldn’t tell. In the east, the horizon was slowly brightening. The doctor watched the light’s ruthless progress across the field, his spirit broken but still nursing some vague hope. The light gave him hope but he was afraid of it too. He would have loved to be lying down in a warm, friendly room, under the tender gaze of pale-skinned young nurses, with a bowl of hot soup before him, spooning it into his mouth, then turning to the wall. He noticed three figures proceeding down the road parallel to the road-sweeper’s house. They were a long way off, hopelessly far off, he couldn’t hear them, only see them, but he could tell that the smallest figure, a child, was passionately explaining something to one of them, while the other adult followed a few strides behind. When they finally came level with him he recognized them: he tried crying out but the wind must have blown his voice away because they took no notice at all but continued on their way to the bar. By the time he started to wonder at seeing these two big-time rogues, people he thought were dead, right in front of him, he had forgotten it alclass="underline" his leg began to hurt with a sharp pain and his throat was dry. Morning found him on the road heading for town. He had no desire to turn back to the bar. He reeled rather than walked, full of confused thoughts, frightened by voices that broke every so often above him. A crowd of rooks seemed to be hanging around, following him; it distinctly looked like they were on his tracks, never letting him out of their sight. By the afternoon, when he reached the fork to Elek he didn’t have enough strength to get up on the cart, it was left to the homeward-bound Kelemen to haul him onto the thoroughly wet straw behind the seat. He felt light headed and the admonitory words of the driver kept echoing through his skulclass="underline" “Doctor, sir, you shouldn’t have! You really shouldn’t have!”