The Rebels (3 page)

She tipped her head towards the boy’s face and squeezed it. They remained like that a moment. People live together but there are long periods when they know nothing of each other’s lives. Then one has the sensation that the other has vanished off the map. This was one corner of the world: his aunt’s furniture inherited from his mother, the garden, his father, the fiddle playing, Jules Verne, and the walk in the cemetery with his aunt on All Souls’ Day. This world had such power that nothing external could destroy it, not even the war. Just once each year some unforeseen thing broke through a chink in it, another world. Everything changed. That which had hitherto been sweet was now bitter, that which had been sour was now like gall. The hothouse became a primeval forest. And his aunt like a corpse, or less than that.

He slammed the glazed door, the bell swung and rang, the sound swam through the air and penetrated the silent house. He looked back from the gate: his aunt stood at the glazed door, her hands linked, and stared at him.

T
HE WINDOWS OF THE THEATER WERE LIT
. A
CAR
was waiting by the side door that led to the upstairs boxes. He cut across the high street and decided to call on Ernõ’s father.

The cobbler had returned home some eighteen months ago with a serious wound in his lungs and had been spitting blood ever since. He lived in a high apartment block down a narrow alleyway among fishmongers, in a cellar that was five shallow steps down from the street and served as both his workplace and his accommodation. The entrance was surrounded by painted signs that he himself had made, signs involving mysterious pictures studded with captions in a hodgepodge of biblical language, exhorting any passerby to live modestly and to come to Christ. “Young man, hold high your Shield of Faith,” proclaimed one sign. “God takes no pleasure in your great knowledge, your rank, your strength, or your declarations of religion, but if you give your heart to Jesus He will put a veil between you and your past and prepare you for the glory of the Lord,” said another. “Raise our hearts, almighty Savior, like the serpent of brass, so that those who are disappointed in life might be cured by embracing You,” said a third. And one in particularly large letters declared: “Neither will death always begin with dying. There are many among us living yet coffined. Dedicate yourself to death; lay your life in the hands of Jesus and you will no longer fear death.”

People stopped, read the texts, shook their heads, and walked on in astonishment.

The workshop was densely shrouded in the half-light and a simmering bowl full of paste filled the room with its ripe, sour, acid smell. The cobbler was sitting hunched by an oxyacetylene lamp next to a low table, like a huge shaggy insect hypnotized by the circle of light. Once he noticed the boy he carefully arranged everything he had been working with on the table, including the large uncured leather sole that had been lying on his lap, the shoe knife, the thread, and a scrawny yellow half shoe, and only then stood up and bowed deeply.

“Blessed be the name of the Lord. He who confirms us in our faith and leads us to victory over our foes.”

What Ábel liked about him was that he issued his grandly ceremonial greetings in such an indifferent, commonplace manner he might have simply been mouthing “your servant.” The cobbler was a short, shriveled man entirely consumed by his disease. The weight of his leather apron seemed to drag him down. One leg was shorter than another, a condition he contracted before the bullet found his lung. A long mustache dripped from his wasted, bony face, adhering to his tousled beard and uncut hair that would not lie flat, but covered his skull like a wire wig, a shrub full of thistles. His great black eyes shone and turned with a confused light deep beneath his brow, the whites as large as a Negro’s.

“The young gentleman is looking for my son, Ernõ,” said the cobbler, his peculiarly small white sickly hand gesturing him to take a seat. There was considerable natural grace in his movements. He himself did not sit down, but leaned on a short crooked stick to address his guest. “My son Ernõ is not at home. We must be reasonable about such things. We cannot ask him to spend all his time with his parents. The young gentlemen have taken their exams today and have therefore moved up a step in the eyes of God and man.”

He spoke in a flat voice, with as little emotion or expression as ever, as if he were praying or reciting the liturgy.

“My unworthy son, Ernõ, has today been allotted his place among the gentlemen sons of gentlemen fathers,” he continued. “Judging by the available evidence it seems it was not the Lord’s will that my son Ernõ should be a prop to his parents in their old age. He wants my son to live among gentlemen, and to become my enemy. It would be foolish and absurd of me to rail against God’s will. Today my son has entered the superior rank of gentlefolk, and he must needs be the enemy of his lowly parents, his relations, and everyone who knew him.”

He made a gesture in the air with his hand as if bestowing a blessing. “He who recognizes the hand of God in mortal affairs rejoices in sickness, misfortune, and enmity between his kinfolk. My son Ernõ is a quiet boy who rejects the forthrightness the great source of Light has bestowed on me, his father, so that I may fulfill my obligations. The way has opened unto him: mountains have collapsed. It is utterly certain that the hour has come when the ruling social order must demand bloody sacrifices. Millions are lying dead in the ditches of the world and, insignificant as I am, I have been allowed to survive while the ruling classes offer involuntary sacrifices unto the earth and its waters.”

Yes, Mr. Zakarka, said Ábel. May I speak to Ernõ?

“Indeed,” he continued undisturbed. “Be so gracious as to consider the scale of the matter. We have been used to seeing how the ruling class, with its remarkable refinement, its extraordinary achievements in each and every field, remained immune to all natural disasters such as earthquakes, flood, fire, and war, providing God’s finger had not picked them out specifically. We have been used to there being two classes in the world, one living in close proximity to the other, but having less to do with it than do locusts with bears. Please be so gracious as to remember that the last days are here. The sons of the ruling class are lying in the same lime pits as the sons of the low. The prophets have risen and their words are becoming audible; the Lord has marked even my humble words out for hearing and for following.”

The cobbler threw a long shadow in the hissing light of the oxyacetylene lamp. He gave an occasional cough adding “Beg your pardon” each time as he trundled off into a corner of the workshop where he spent some time hawking and spitting.

Ábel sat there, leaning forward. He knew he had to wait until the cobbler had had his say. The Bible lay on a shelf on the wall among a few old mugs and pots, with a child-sized meter-high crucifix on the wall beside it. The cobbler swayed as he walked, very much dependent on his stick. After he had finished coughing he continued in a cracked voice.

“As concerns my son, Ernõ,” he began, tucking his hands under his leather apron, “the young gentlemen were kind enough to accept him into their company, for which he will owe them an eternal debt of gratitude, a debt that will linger long after the young gentlemen have gone. By any human estimation my son Ernõ, with his stunted body and inherited diseases, is likely to outlive the young gentlemen who treated him with such kindness, and who have proved more amenable than my unfortunate son to following the examples of their heroic gentlemen fathers. It goes to show that there’s a point even to illness and deformation. The young gentlemen are going where all are equal in the eyes of death, but Ernõ is staying here. He will become a gentleman since the hour of trial will pass from the face of the earth, and those who remain will be the recipients of God’s special favor. It is my intention to remain alive long enough to see that hour.”

Having announced this he gave an easy courteous bow, an almost apologetic bow as if there was nothing he could do about any of this. Ábel looked at the crucifix. The cobbler followed his gaze with a stern expression.

“The young gentlemen were kind to my son. Especially the son of the much respected Mr. Prockauer. I must not forget this. Young Master Prockauer, though not personally respectable, enjoys such an elevated position in the world owing to the very high respect in which his honorable father is held, that his friendship is an honor of which my son will be forever sensible. Ernõ is aware how much he owes to the gentleman. It may be because of his natural taciturnity that he has not spoken of his gratefulness to me, though, naturally, my poor understanding cannot gauge the deeper meaning of what gentlemen say. But what the waking will not say, the sleeping will occasionally utter. My son has often addressed young Master Prockauer by his first name when asleep.”

“Tibor?” asked Ábel. His throat was dry.

The cobbler stepped into a chamber of the cellar that was hidden by a curtain. “I slept here at his feet,” he said and waved in the direction of a box bed with drawers under it. “I took to the floor, which is harder, and gave up the bed to my son so he should get used to the gentlemen’s style of doing things. That’s where I heard, more than once, my son shout out the first name of young Master Prockauer. A person only calls to someone else in his sleep when he is suffering. I have no way of telling what caused my son to suffer in his sleep so that he should cry out the young gentleman’s name.”

He allowed the curtain to fall as if covering up some shameful sight. So this is where Ernõ lives, thought Ábel. He had never dared imagine where Ernõ slept, what he ate, or what they talked about at home. He had visited the workshop often enough recently, but always when Ernõ was away, and the cobbler had never shown him the room where he and his son lived. But this was where Ernõ slept with his father. His mother probably had her own bed in the place.

“Perhaps it was out of gratefulness that my son shouted out Master Prockauer’s first name,” said the cobbler. “The young gentleman had long honored my son with his company. Even in the lower years at school he allowed my son to take home books belonging to his father, the colonel. And later, when the young gentleman was, with perfectly excusable carelessness, neglecting his studies, the colonel’s boy bestowed on my son the distinction of allowing him to be of help to him. The good graces of gentlemen are indeed inscrutable. It was thanks to the offices of the good colonel that I was permitted to take part in that great cleansing at the front.”

“In what?” Ábel leaned forward. The cobbler straightened. “The cleansing. It is not the proper time to speak of everything just yet. The only man capable of being cleansed is he who has undergone humiliations. The good colonel, whose son showered such favors on my son, made it possible for me to be cleansed, when he chose me in the absence of his official aide. I had three opportunities to be cleansed.”

He extended his hands before him.

“For one who gives life, all methods are equally suitable when employing an aide for the taking of life. Be so kind as to consider all we have to thank the noble gentlemen of the Prockauer family for. My son not only had the privilege of educating a high-ranking officer’s son, and, in due course, to appear in the company of gentlemen of which he would become one even while wearing his castoffs, but I, his father, am in the colonel’s debt for having been allowed to participate in the great cleansing appointed by the Lord, in a triple cleansing. With these two hands. Is the young gentleman unaware of this?”

“You, Mr. Zakarka?” asked Ábel and stood up. He wasn’t shocked but he was filled with wonder.

“I had three opportunities. Didn’t my son Ernõ mention these to the young gentlemen? Perhaps he didn’t want to brag about his father’s cleansing, and if so, he did right, because it is proper that the lowly should retain his modesty, even when, out of their goodness, gentlemen permit him to join them. I had three opportunities of being cleansed. Be so gracious as to be informed that the war which the Lord in his goodness allowed to happen so that we might see our sins, offers us mortals few opportunities for cleansing. Aiming a gun and, at a certain distance, bringing down a man is not the same as snuffing out a life with our bare hands, and I do mean precisely that. It is different closing one’s hands about a person’s neck and breaking his vertebra, different from, say, using a sharp implement and wounding a fellow human being, and different again from bombarding someone at a distance with the assistance of certain explosive materials. Cleansing can only occur when a man is directly in touch with death. And, what was more, all three were gentlemen.”

“Who were they?” the boy asked.

They were standing eye to eye. The cobbler leaned closer.

“Czech officers. Traitors from the motherland’s point of view. It was a peculiar act of grace on the colonel’s part, an act for which I will remain eternally grateful to him that he entrusted me with officers, not common people. As I have said, my family stands in especial debt to the Prockauers. I hear the condition of the noble lady has deteriorated.”

“When did you hear?” asked Ábel overeagerly.

He immediately regretted asking the question. The cobbler’s eyes roved round the room then suddenly found and buried themselves in his own, the feeling hot and sharp. It was like looking into dazzling light. He closed his eyes. The condition of Tibor’s mother had been giving cause for concern for several days. It was a strange feeling, this anxiety. They didn’t talk about it. The colonel’s wife had been bed-bound for three years: her condition changed but she didn’t rise from her bed. Her elder son, who had returned a few months previously as an ensign, having lost an arm at the front, stubbornly kept repeating that she was perfectly capable of getting up and simply didn’t want to. He told people that once the boys were in bed at night she would rise from her sickbed and walk about in the apartment. If there was indeed a change in the condition of Tibor’s mother then something had to be done quickly for the colonel might appear any day. He didn’t dare look at the cobbler who stood directly in front of him and who seemed to have grown somewhat in the twilight. Ábel knew he was the same height as the cobbler but felt as though he were being forced to look up at him. The light in the cobbler’s eyes slowly went out. They both looked down.