Sandor Marai - The Rebels

They decided to seek a proper repository for their loot. Ábel’s aunt, for all her credulity and infinite patience, did nevertheless notice the saddle and full set of equine apparatus in his room. The colonel’s wife started feeling better that fall and talked of rising from her bed. There was no immediate danger since at the beginning of every season Mrs. Prockauer tended to forewarn the world of her imminent emergence, predicting that she would soon be up and walking, but nothing had come of it in all these years. One fall afternoon they hired a cab and drove out to The Peculiar. They dined at the inn. The one-armed one set off to explore the house with the result that he discovered some rooms-to-let in the mezzanine.

The Peculiar was built on a gentle slope, a half hour’s coach ride from town, in the middle of a partially cleared forest. Behind it loomed a dense bristling wall of pines, with the bare crags of the mountain rising to a peak above it, a peak whose glittering cap of snow might make anyone think they were in the Alps. The place had once been a spa, and a few empty neglected buildings, which used to be popular with the local bourgeoisie in the summer at the end of the last century, were ranged round the inn. Ábel had a faint memory of how, a very long time ago, in the early years of his childhood when his mother was still alive, they had vacationed here in August. A bitter, sulfurous water still bubbled from the spring. The long tobacco-smelling dining room of the inn with its pendulous oil-burning chandeliers, the ceiling decorated with old boughs, reminded him of the so-called Anna Balls, named after the ball first given in his daughter’s honor by one János Szentgyörgyi Horváth back in 1825. Along the floor, where it met the walls, dry rot fungus grew in luxuriant forms. When the weather was very hot some summers, groups of picnickers might find their way here. The inn itself was still approached through a mass of tipped-up tables on white gravel in a garden with a few straggling trees, surrounded by rotten stakes that served to support empty tin lantern casings. Glass domes prevented wind blowing the candles out on the tables. The place was sticky with damp and neglect, a neglect that seemed to symbolize the human condition at large.

“No,” said the man, “no one comes here in the fall.”

He was elderly, with a Slavonic accent, and had been struggling to maintain the property that he had acquired decades ago at an auction and was now stuck with. He told them that a few years ago, in peacetime, which they wouldn’t be able to remember, couples from town used to make excursions here. The happy memory of once playing mild Cupid to a generation of genteel lovers flickered across his tired, careworn face. That was when he had fitted out the three guest rooms upstairs. This gay, salacious period came to an end with the outbreak of war. Nowadays, it seemed, couples no longer thought it necessary to avoid the public gaze. The rooms had stood empty for years. There was nothing to stop them installing a couple of iron stoves there. He and his wife spent the whole winter here.

The gang hemmed and hawed. Should they or shouldn’t they, they wondered as they chewed their tasteless salami and Liptauer, sipped at their beers, and silently pondered the idea. The one-armed one stuttered and offered arguments but they ignored him. Ábel was lightly aware of his heart beating. Without having exchanged a word on the subject they felt they had come to a turning point. Taken aback by the idea, Béla spoke with his mouth full, “Well, well, friend…” They were all preoccupied by the thought of a hiding place, regretting they hadn’t discovered one before. Had they done so earlier, having one would have prevented them sneaking about and relieved them of the constant sense of shame. They proceeded silently up the rotting wooden stairs, in single file. Years of unattended rubbish and gloom had gathered in the room. The windows opened onto the pine forest. The beds lay bare, without sheet or blanket, as if glued to the walls that were themselves hung with cobwebs. Mice had clearly been busy at their work of destruction. The tabletop was covered in mouse droppings.

“Wonderful!” cried the one-armed one. “No one could possibly live here now!”

Using his thumb and forefinger he carefully lifted a woman’s comb from the dust on one of the bedside tables. The filthy object suggested something lascivious, the lost illusions of a long-forgotten affair. They examined it, bright-eyed. The notion that no one could live here now allowed them to consider the room as their own.

It was Béla who struck the deal for two rooms. The following week they made the most thoroughgoing preparations for the move. The proprietor thought the young gentlemen were after a location for various discreet rendezvous. By the end of the first week he had to admit he was disappointed in that hope. There were daily deliveries, the arrival of the bicycle signaling the end of all the comings and goings. Every day it was a different young man with a knapsack full of peculiar hard-to-explain items. Had he not known that he was dealing with students he might have felt rather uneasy. But seeing it was the son of Colonel Prockauer and his school friends what was there to worry about? Each arrival vanished into one of the rooms, locked the door, and spent a long time in there fiddling with things. After they had gone the proprietor would carefully creep in and take a look, but a few strange items of dress, the great globe, and those harmless books suggested no cause for alarm.

The gang relaxed its ideals regarding uselessness. The knowledge that they had their own, and to a large degree independent, hiding place, a space they could do what they liked with, a room they could safely lock, slowly intoxicated even the most sober of them. They spent entire afternoons in their foul-smelling lair by the sweating iron stove, swimming in demonic cigarette smoke, arguing, making up pointless games, and refining their rules. This was the time of proper games. It was a second childhood, guiltier than the first but less restrained, more exciting, more sweet.

They would arrive as soon as they could in the winter afternoon, immediately after lunch. The bicycle was used by whosever turn it was to arrive first and light the stove. By this time they had supplies of tea, rum, brandy, and tobacco. The smell of rum saturated the walls of the airless room, and according to Ábel anyone who came in would think he was in a ship’s cabin. All cabins smelled of rum, Ábel insisted. The saddle lay on the bed, with the hunting rifle next to it, and a visitor was more likely to think that he had entered the lair of a criminal on the run, and that the fugitive occupant was resting his exhausted limbs somewhere while his hard-driven horse was ambling about in the snow. The hideaway served all their purposes. It offered a shelter unknown to fathers, teachers, and the powers-that-be. It was somewhere real life could finally begin. That life resembled nothing they had hitherto known. It wasn’t like their fathers’ lives, lives that did not appeal to them in the least. Here they could discuss whatever remained unfinished or unexplored. Here the discipline that governed every aspect of their childhood lives could no longer threaten or haunt them.

They had long ago stopped being children, but here, in this room, they discovered that they dared to do what would have shamed them in town, even in front of each other, that, somewhat shyly, they could continue playing at childhood, indulging a part of themselves that could never properly be developed in childhood, a part they still retained. It was only from this vantage point that they could clearly see the adult world as it was and discuss their experiences of it. The one-armed one entered this game with real passion. His nervous stuttering laughter grew more relaxed here. This bolt-hole in The Peculiar was the only place where, occasionally, even Ernõ could be seen laughing.