Sandor Marai - The Rebels

THIS WAS WHERE THEY GOT TO KNOW EACHother. The secret and secure comradeship that had separated them from the rest of town gave them an opportunity to explore each other’s characters in ways they hadn’t tried before. Everyone had to tell “everything that had happened.” It was self-evidently the case that this “everything that had happened” referred only to the time they had spent under the watchful eyes of their parents. It slowly became clear to them that it was no coincidence that had brought them together like this.

They arranged “afternoons of fear.” Everyone had to reveal what it was they had been most afraid of “in the early days.” In this way they discovered that each of them had something they had not hitherto shared. These “fears” were located in the misty past, at some uncertain distance in time. One such afternoon when it had grown dark and they were squatting in a circle round the dying stove, the one-armed one said the time when he was most afraid was not in the flickering light of the field hospital, on the operating table, but when, at the age of seven, through the glass door of the verandah, he saw his father looming over his mother, the pair of them wrestling, until his mother used both her hands to push his face away and ran off into her room. He had felt so scared at that moment he thought he was going to die. As soon as he had said this he started stuttering again and had a spell of nervous hiccups. In the meantime Béla, who was sitting in the window watching the light reflected off the snow, tried to collect his own feelings.

“Being afraid is good,” he said.

It was a painful process trying to explain what he understood by the “pleasure” of fear. Tentatively, over several weeks, he had tried to analyze the roots of his own fear while the others were looking for ways to communicate with each other. Once he discovered that he could not get beyond a certain embarrassing point in his life, he stopped in shock and fell silent. Ábel and Ernõ subjected him to a strict cross-examination.

“I am ashamed of it,” he confessed in pain.

He was given two days to collect himself. It was strange that he who had been so excitably lewd and foul-mouthed so far had now to defend his peculiar modesty. The gang was all the more surprised by this sudden shyness regarding his memory, especially since, as it turned out after extended interrogation, there was nothing salacious in it. It was more comical than anything but it was only after a prolonged period of agonizing that he could bring himself to tell them.

We were living on the ground floor then, he started, perspiring and red in the face. Turn your faces away!

It was as if that had been the most trying part of the narrative, for now he spoke in a fever, rapidly, telling them how the end of the ground-floor passage opened onto the neighbor’s garden. Béla had been a timid child with a strict upbringing who even at the age of six would be so alarmed by harsh words that he wet his pants. Whenever this happened he would dry his trousers but would bundle up his underwear and throw the incriminating evidence into the neighbor’s garden. He had disposed of eight pairs of underpants that way. The expectation that his deeds would be discovered and that he would be humiliated and punished brought him to such a pitch of anxiety that he would suffer even more such childhood accidents. And once he actually was discovered and his father had given him a sound thrashing, he felt such a wave of relief flooding through him, such a sense of happiness and well-being, as he had never felt before.

Please understand, he croaked out as quickly as he could, that being afraid was a pleasure. I had calculated what my punishment would be and anticipated it. I learned to calculate it over a period. I knew what it was that would get me a box on the ear, what resulted in a beating, what in being made to go hungry: all that was calculable. It was dreadful living in anticipation of what was to come, but once it came it felt good.

ERNÕ SPOKE UP EVENTUALLY.

You know my father, he said. It took him a long time to become the buffoon he is now. He even learned to read late, only once he had grown up. He read just two books, the Bible and a cheap old eighteenth-century reference work, The Little Threefold Mirror, that everyone knew. I’m not ashamed of him, but then you know nothing about our relationship. He’s right when he talks about the division of wealth. Wealth does not consist of having money. It’s something quite different. I shall never possess it, while you—every one of you—has had it from the moment you were born.

My first real knowledge of fear was when one day my father stood in front of the mirror. I can have been hardly more than a toddler. I was sitting in a corner of the workshop on a low stool. We had a lame crow that my father had brought home. We had its wings clipped and it lived with us. I was sitting on the stool, playing with the crow. My father was working away in the room. At that time he had no beard, nor did he hobble. Suddenly he stopped, stood up, and as if I were not there at all went over to the chest of drawers, lifted the mirror off the wall, brought it over to the table, and looked at himself. I stared at him, speechless, nursing the crow in my lap. My father grasped his nose between finger and thumb and pulled it upwards. Then he bared his teeth. He began to swivel his eyes and twist his mouth and pull faces the like of which I had never seen. He carried on doing this for a long time, completely absorbed in it. My mouth gaped wide open as I stared. At first I felt like laughing, but I quickly realized it was nothing to laugh about. My father’s expressions when he swiveled his eyes and twisted his lips were so strange that I began to be afraid. He took a step backward as if preparing to burst into laughter and opened his mouth monstrously wide. He knotted his eyebrows and snarled furiously. Then he began to weep. Suddenly he leapt towards me as if only just noticing my presence. I screamed out, in fear that he wanted to kill me. He leaned over me, his face deformed in a way I had never seen a face before, nor since for that matter. With one hand he grabbed the crow, squeezed the creature’s neck, then threw it in front of me on the floor. Having done so he rushed out.

The crow lay before me lifeless. I had been playing with it for about a year. I picked it up and, since its body was still warm, began to rock and nurse it. That is how I was discovered by my mother, though I never told her what had happened. I think I must have felt that it was not to do with her. My father didn’t come home that night. When he returned the next morning he brought a box into which he placed the crow, took my hand as if nothing had happened, and led me out into the yard.

Here we buried the crow. My father lavished such care on digging the grave and talked to me so cheerfully as he did so that I couldn’t understand what he had been so furious about the day before and why he had to strangle the crow. But ever since then, when I’m left alone in a room with a mirror, I feel afraid in case I too should stand in front of it and start pulling faces.

THE WHITE TAILCOAT FITTED TIBOR SO SNUGLYhe looked quite a man of the world. They did dress up sometimes. Béla sprawled in a chair wearing his red tailcoat, a top hat on his head, his gloves in his hand. The pettiest things made adequate toys for them in this mood. They could amuse themselves with an idea suggested by an object or the whim of a moment as long and as intensely as a child can play with a simple bell. Now each of them discovered an aptitude for acting.

The one-armed one became a passionate producer. He gave them their tasks in a few words and immediately set up the scene. They played out scenes in court, in close family circles, in recruitment offices, at teachers’ conferences, on the bridges of sinking ships. Every child is a gifted actor. They clung to this forgotten talent, their one recompense for the world they were losing. This world glowed faintly behind the familiar world. Ábel believed that he could recall some episodes and sentences from it.