o more than a minute before the cause of their unexpected retreat became apparent, for their intuition had warned them something was about to happen and this faultless, naked and instinctive fear of the unpredictable was enough to drive them to the option of immediate flight. By the time Mrs Eszter moved and disturbed the up-till-then-unbroken silence, the three rats were cowering in perfect safety at the foot of the outside wall at the back of the house; so she rose from the very ocean bed of sleep, drifting for a few minutes up into the shallows through which consciousness might faintly glimmer, and kicked off the eiderdown, stretching her limbs as if about to wake. There was of course no prospect of that yet and, after a few heavy sighs, she settled and began her descent into the depths from which she had only just risen. Her body — perhaps simply because it was no longer covered — seemed to grow even bigger than it already was, too big for the bed and indeed for the entire room: she was an enormous dinosaur in a tiny museum, so large no one knew how she had got there since both doors and windows were far too small to admit her. She lay on the bed, legs spread wide, and her round belly — very much an elderly man’s beer-gut — rose and fell like a sluggish pump; her nightgown gathered itself about her waist, and since it was no longer capable of keeping her warm, her thick thighs and stomach broke out in goosepimples. For now only the skin registered the change; the sleeper remained undisturbed, and since the noise had died away and there was nothing else to alarm them, the three rats once more ventured into the room, a little more at home this time but still maintaining utmost vigilance, prepared to flee at the slightest provocation, retracing their previous routes across the floor. They were so fast, so silent, their existence barely crossed the sensible threshold of reality; never once contradicting their blurry shadowy essence, they continually balanced the extent of their excursions against the peril of their sphere of activity, so that no one should discover them: those slightly darker patches in the darkness of the room were not hallucinations born of fatigue, not merely shadows cast by the immaterial birds of night, but three obsessively careful animals, tireless in their search for food. For that is why they had come as soon as the sleeper had fallen quiet, and why they returned, and if they hadn’t yet run up the table leg to pinch the heel of bread lying among the crumbs it was only because they had to be certain nothing unexpected would happen. They started with the crust, but little by little, and with ever greater abandon, they stuck their sharp little noses into the loaf itself and nibbled at it, though there was no sign of impatience in the rapid movement of their jaws, and the bread, tugged this way and that in three directions, was almost consumed by the time it rolled off the table and under the stool. Of course they froze when it hit the ground and once more stuck their snouts into the air, prepared to make a dash for it, but all was quiet on the Eszter front, there was nothing but slow even breathing, so, after a good minute of suspense, they quickly slipped to the floor and under the stool. And, as they were to find, it was in fact better for them here, for apart from the dense darkness providing greater protection, they could cut down the risks of exposure in retreating to the cover of the bed and thence to freedom when their extraordinary instinct finally told them to abandon the now barely recognizable piece of loaf. The night, in any case, was slowly coming to an end, a hoarse cockerel was furiously crowing, an equally angry dog had begun to bark and thousands and thousands of sleepers, Mrs Eszter among them, sensed the coming of dawn and entered the last dream. The three rats, together with their numerous confrères, were scuttling and squeaking in the neighbour’s tumbledown shed among frozen cobs of well-gnawed corn, when, like someone recoiling from a scene of horror, she gave a disconsolate snort, trembled, turned her head rapidly from left to right a few times, beating it on the pillow, then, staring-eyed, suddenly sat up in the bed. She struggled for breath and looked wildly this way and that in the still twilit room before she recognized where she was and understood that everything she had just abandoned had ceased to exist, then rubbed her burning eyes, massaged her goosepimpled limbs, drew the discarded covers over her and slid down again with a relieved sigh. But there was no question of going back to sleep because as soon as the awful nightmare vanished from her consciousness it was replaced by the awareness of the day ahead and what she was to accomplish, and such a thrill of pleasurable excitement ran through her she couldn’t drop off again. She felt refreshed and ready for action, and decided there and then to get up, for she was convinced that deed should immediately and without hesitation follow on design, so she threw off the eiderdown and stood a little uncertainly on the freezing floor, then donned her quilted jacket, grabbed the empty kettle and went out into the yard to bring in some water for washing. She took a deep lungful of chilling air, glanced at the dome of funereal cloud above her and asked herself if there could be anything more bracing than these merciless, masculine winter dawns, when cowards hide their heads and those ‘called to life venture bravely forth’. If there was anything she loved it was this, the earth clapped under ice, the razor-sharp air, and the unyielding solidarity of cloud which firmly repulsed the weak or dreamy gaze so the eye should not be confused by the potential ambiguities of the clear deep sky. She let the wind bite viciously into her flesh as the flaps of her jacket flew apart, and though the cold was practically burning her feet under the worn wooden soles of her slippers, it never entered her mind to hurry about her task. She was already thinking of the water that would wash away the remaining warmth of the bed, but she was to be disappointed in this, for though she was particularly looking forward to crowning the whole experience of dawn in this manner, the pump wouldn’t work: the rags and newsprint they had tried to insulate it with had proved no defence against the withering cold, so she was forced to wipe away the scum on top of the water left in the basin from last night and, abandoning any idea of a thorough wash, to dab at her face and tiny breasts, and, likewise with her hairy lower torso, she had to be content with giving herself a military-style dry wipe, for ‘a person can’t be expected to squat over a basin as usual when the water’s so dirty’. Of course it upset her to have to forgo such arctic delights, but a little thing like this wouldn’t ruin her day (‘not this of all days …’), so once she’d finished wiping herself and imagined Eszter’s look of astonishment as, a few hours from now, he bent over the open suitcase, she dismissed the painful likelihood that she would ‘suffer from BO’ the rest of the day and busied herself mechanically fiddling with this and that. Her fingers fairly flew and by the time it was clear daylight she had not only dressed, swept up and made the bed but, having discovered the evidence of last night’s crimes (not that she minded them too much, for apart from having got accustomed to such things, she had developed something of an affection for these brave little revellers), she sprinkled the well-chewed remnant with a ‘trusty rat poison’, so ‘her sweet little bastards’ could feast themselves to kingdom come should they dare return to the room. And since there was nothing more to tidy, organize, pick up or adjust, with a superior smile on her lips she ceremoniously lifted the battered old suitcase off the top of the wardrobe, opened the lid, then knelt down beside it on the floor and ran her eyes over the blouses and towels, stockings and knickers stacked in orderly piles on the wardrobe shelves, and in a few minutes had transferred them all into the yawning depths of the suitcase. The clicking shut of the rusty locks, the pulling on of her coat and, after all the waiting, all the frustration, the setting out with only this lightest of burdens for company, of action in other words — this was precisely what she had longed for, the intoxicating fact of which went some way to explaining the degree to which she overestimated the significance and effect of her highly (perhaps too highly) planned