The Rebels (14 page)

The actor was happy enough to swear, his only condition being that he should be able to wear a frock coat and that the table should be prepared with four burning candles. He entered the secret room nervously, his face showing no interest, without removing his gloves, his hat still on his head, and stood in the middle of the room, sniffing the air like a connoisseur and declaring in a frostily polite voice and with a stiff, unsmiling expression: Charming! He brightened when he spotted the store of clothes. They had to dress up there and then. He gave tiny cries of delight as he knotted neckties, forgetting the frosty politeness and show of indifference with which he had entered, took a step or two backward, and produced the most exquisite effects with a movement of his eyebrow. They were not going to make any progress with the problem of Béla that afternoon. They were all infected by the actor’s enthusiasm. Béla dressed and undressed with a desperate concentration, throwing on one item after another, while the actor delved drunkenly into the store of neckties, silk shirts, and cosmetics that Béla had so thoughtfully and skillfully accumulated. Once they were all strutting around in costumes the actor spread his arms like the conductor of an orchestra, took a step backwards, and with a serious, concerned expression examined each of them in turn, then, his head set back, under half-closed lids, summed up his general impression: “You should all be on stage,” he said. And after a short meditative pause: “In an amateur sense, I mean.”

They too felt they should be on stage. The utter impossibility of their ambition depressed them. “With an invited audience…,” suggested the actor. “Without written parts, of course. Everyone would be free to say whatever came into his head.” With the actor to encourage them in their strange costumes they suddenly marveled at their wealth. The problem was that the treasure trove of inestimable value that they had amassed was worth very little in ready cash. They sneaked back into town that evening feeling they were doomed. As they were preparing to part, Lajos waved Tibor over and put his hand on his shoulder.

“The silver,” he said.

“The silver?” asked the actor, pricking up his ears. “What silver? If you have silver everything can be fixed.”

He pronounced this with such authority that they fell silent, quite awestruck. They knew what silver. The silver that lay in a leather trunk under the bed of the colonel’s wife! Only the actor had been ignorant of the silver, and now the solution was perfectly clear to him.

“As long as the silver is really there,” he repeated anxiously. “I’ll have a word with Havas. He is a friend of mine and knows all about silver.”

“What did you think would happen?” Tibor slowly turned to Béla, speaking with childishly clear enunciation, breaking the words up into syllables. His voice was full of infinite wonder. “What did you think you would do? You must have known they would discover the loss.”

They stood on the street corner in the light of a gas lamp, forming a tight dark group. It was at this moment that Béla’s self-control deserted him.

“Think? Me?!” he declared with great indignation. “I didn’t think anything. How could I have thought at all? No. And you?” he hesitated as if he were deeply astounded by something. “Did any of you think at all, at any time?”

And this was exactly what had to be said at that precise moment, in the first moment of sanity they had experienced for months; this was what had to be said in order to set Tibor’s question in the real world and expose the unreality of their own actions. It was a question their fathers might have asked, or the mayor, or anyone at all, anyone except Tibor. For the first time they understood that the world they had constructed around themselves, that sheltered them, would collapse about their ears if they broke one single law of the real one.

Conveniently, the colonel’s wife had to be taken into the hospital for two days of observation so Ábel and Tibor took the silver and handed it over to Havas. Béla managed to transfer the money to the merchant with a certain regret, as if he could think of better uses for it. Afterwards Ábel insisted they should visit the apprentice boy who was serving Béla’s sentence for him.

Béla had only the faintest memory of the boy. Once they received their visitors’ permits and, deeply embarrassed, had laden themselves with fruits and other foodstuffs, they waited for him in the reception room of the correctional institute in a state of ever greater anxiety and restlessness. Through the windows they could see the workshops where other inmates labored—the joinery, the locksmith’s, and the bakery—while a detachment of blue-uniformed others puttered about between the long flower beds, attended by a guard. There were quite a few there and each year of the war produced its fresh harvest of them. They gazed at the bars on the dormitory block windows, the bleak hall where they themselves silently loitered, the benches covered with waxed canvas and the single crucifix on the wall. This house of correction was specifically set aside for those who shared their own world and they had never felt so keenly divided from the world and society of adults as they did in the minutes they spent there. They were forced to see that while they played and—half consciously, half unconsciously—built their own society like a cell within adult society, theirs was just one cell of the real world. They understood that there existed not just a cell but a whole world like theirs, a world whose laws, ethics, and structure differed sharply from that of the adults, and that this world had a dynamic that was equal to the one in which adults struggled and perished, that had its own hierarchies and mysterious coherence. They couldn’t help feeling that there was a logic behind all that they had done these last few years. It might have been their task, their vocation, to maintain the principle of everything-for-its-own-sake. They huddled closer together and gazed sympathetically through the window at all those unknown others of their kind.

The boy came in somewhat reluctantly, his instructor exhorting him to take more confident steps, his cap in his hand, and approached them with a suspicious look on his face. They gathered round him and spoke to him quietly. The boy had bright passionate eyes, intelligent and stubborn.

“Why did you confess?” asked Béla in a whisper.

The boy cast an anxious glance towards his instructor who was staring out of the window. He gestured for a cigarette and quickly sneaked it into the lining of his cap.

“Because I stole things, you idiot,” he scornfully muttered.

They stared at him, uncomprehending. Then, speaking very fast and very quietly, he launched into a speech.

“What do you think? That I was idiot enough to get myself locked up here if they didn’t have anything on me? Sure, I stole, and more, more than they know. Lucky for me the gang didn’t rat on me. We all stole from the shop, and from the warehouse too.”

He fell silent, looked into their eyes suspiciously, then, relaxing, continued. “You stole more than I did, of course, I knew that perfectly well, but what’s that to do with me? That’s your business. Careful, he’s looking this way.”

The instructor walked up to them, they handed over the packages and said their goodbyes with averted eyes. They crossed the big garden without a word while the child prisoners stopped work and watched them go. Once they were far enough away from the gate Ernõ was the first to break the silence.

“They had a gang too,” he mouthed with amazement.

“And a hiding place,” Béla humbly acknowledged.

Lost in thought, they meandered back towards the town where, presumably, there were many gangs just like theirs with hiding places like the room at The Peculiar. They must be there, all over the world, in towns inhabited by adults, among barracks and churches, little robber gangs, millions and millions of them. All there, with their own hiding places, with their own rules, all under the spell of some extraordinary imperative, the imperative to rebel. And they sensed they would not be part of this strange world for much longer, that pretty soon perhaps they too would be classed as enemies by a pre-adult or two. It was painful to be aware of that, to know that something was irretrievable, and they hung their heads.

W
HAT THEY COULD NOT BELIEVE, HOWEVER, WAS
that all four of them were virgins.

They had lied so much to each other and to others beyond their circle about this, with lies so extraordinarily convoluted, that the truth that seemed, somehow, to pop out in the actor’s presence was more shocking to them than to the actor. Their anatomical knowledge of the arts of love had seemed perfect, almost infinitely so. Every single one of their previous companions bragged—and not always untruthfully—that they had crossed the threshold and survived love’s ordeal of fire. They had chattered of love and women with such apparent expertise that once the truth was out it sounded quite incredible. Each of them was aware of everyone else’s indulgence in the solitary vice, and there was no particular reason to be skeptical about Béla since he had never denied it.

The actor’s dark Mississippi-minstrel eyes rolled rapidly under the closed lids.

“You neither?” he turned grandly to Ábel who was chewing his lips and shook his head to confirm.

“Ah!” he spun round to Tibor. “But you, Tibor. Not you? Not once?”

Tibor nodded, his cheeks scarlet, to indicate, Never.

“Béla? You, who for such a long time supplied money to last year’s juvenile lead? You told me so yourself!”

The actor fluttered round his room, rubbing his hands.

“And you, Ernõ?”

Ernõ took off his pince-nez as he always did when confused.

“No,” he answered dully.

The actor grew solemn.

“This is a very serious matter,” he said, frowning. He retreated to a corner of the room, his hands linked behind his back, and was visibly shaken. He talked quietly, walking up and down, taking no notice of them.

“Virgins!” he repeated, and flung his arms up to heaven. “You’re not lying?” he turned anxiously towards them. “No, no, of course you’re not lying,” he reassured himself. “But in that case…astonishing, quite astonishing, my friends!” he cried. “How old are you? You’ve had your birthday? Stout chap! And you? Your birthday is yet to come? Oh, my poor little lamb, my poor dear lambs.” He spread his arms wide and brayed with laughter.

“Don’t for a moment think,” he stopped, suddenly concerned, “that I am laughing at you. It is a beautiful thing being without sin…you can have no idea how splendid it is. You must all have guardian angels. If only I had a guardian angel.”

He dropped his arms in a tragic manner.

“Unfortunately I have never had one.”

Ábel stood up.

“I swear on oath,” he said and raised two fingers. “I swear that I have never been with a girl.”

“Never?” Béla inquired. “Should we repeat the oath after him?”

“I swear on oath,” they all said, Tibor blushing but firmly and loudly, Ernõ with bowed head, like someone who had once committed a sin and would never dare repeat the experiment.

They sniffed around each other like dogs. They reminded each other of their old, confused, bombastic lies. Béla had told them he had a child that he visited twice a year. They had spoken of the licensed brothel with such familiarity you would have thought they were practically habitués of it. But now came the revelation that, with the exception of Tibor who had once ventured as far as the door only to recoil from it, not one of them had dared even approach the threshold of the red-light establishment.

“I was in second grade,” recounted Tibor in a dreamy, singsong voice, “when one morning in the town where we then lived, I took a roundabout route to pass the brothel. I was perfectly clear about its function, about who lived there and who called on them. I knew it was full of girls and I think I had even heard something about the tariff from someone. There was nothing particular in my head as I passed it, nothing either pleasant or unpleasant. I merely turned my head towards it. I had a school satchel on my back, full of books. It was half past seven and, as I passed, a young man came out of the house. He wore a cap and a shirt open at the neck. As he slammed the door the bell rang and he stopped to tie up his shoelaces, propping his foot on the step. He didn’t look round. He didn’t care who saw him, he simply continued tying his shoelaces, as if he were at home, sitting on his own bed. There was nothing strange about this and I knew where the young man had come from and, roughly, what he had been doing in there. He had been with the girls. Not that I knew precisely what he would have done with the girls but I suspected it was that about which adults lied to us, that which they had kept a secret. I had learned almost everything from the servants. But what shook me, and shook me so powerfully I had to stop, and with all those books on my back, lean against the wall of some house, wasn’t that the young man had been with the girls, but that, inside there, he had taken his shoes off. He had been with a girl and had taken his shoes off…What could he have been doing, what kind of thing can anyone do that involves taking off your shoes? It’s hard for me to say this. Perhaps because…that was why I didn’t really dare go with a girl myself. Because there I was at the threshold of the place, my hand on the doorknob, when the image of the boy came back to me, this boy doing his shoes up. Silly thing of course, he had slept with the girl, he must have taken his shoes off. But as far as I was concerned…laugh if you like, but for me there was something terrible about this, as if someone had told me he had killed the girl, or simply committed some indescribably filthy act in there.”