Sandor Marai - The Rebels

When they stood facing each other like this in the room, in costume, far from town, with the key turned behind them, in the acrid smoke of stove and tobacco, by the light of two flickering candles, among their stash of stolen things, joined like this in a compact whose rationale they never fully understood, only felt instinctively, there were times, between two sentences of some game, when they fell silent and stared at each other for a while as if there ought to be some explanation for their being together, for the game, for their lives. After one of these shocks to the system that was inevitably succeeded by an interval of wry, ironic dawdling, Ábel suggested that they should play a game of Raid. Ernõ and the one-armed one left the room and the three remaining put on their fancy clothes and adopted poses of leisurely relaxation such as might be assumed by anyone in a secure hiding place. Ernõ gave the door a loud knock. Their task was to explain, employing whatever outlandish vocabulary was available to them, why they were together like this and what they were doing here. Ernõ and the one-armed one represented the forces of the outside world. They had no particular office. They could have been teachers, detectives, a military police patrol, or simply fathers who had sought out their “underlings”—that was the expression Ábel insisted on using—to get them to account for themselves.

Ernõ asked the questions. The one-armed one stood at attention behind him like a member of the domestic staff behind the headmaster, a common foot soldier behind a general, or like a less powerful adult—a nasty uncle, say—behind a father. Ernõ wore a hat and Béla swung his bamboo cane and held his deerskin gloves in his hand as they both walked up and down the room. Every so often he removed his pince-nez and held it before him between finger and thumb to clean it. He had come to a conclusion, he announced, and having discovered them in flagrante, established that they, the pupils, had for some time now been breaking the rules and had without permission of their parents, teachers, their betters, and of civil and military authorities generally, consciously decamped from town so that they might lock themselves away in one room of an inn set in a far from reputable bathing place, where they indulged in smoking and drinking alcoholic drinks and remained there for hours at a time. The sight that greeted the entering authorities was certainly strange.

“Prockauer, stand up. Putting aside the question of your progress, which is regrettably slow, I must admit your recent behavior in school has given no particular cause for complaint. I am sorry to note however that the evidence I see around me constitutes a breach of the rules. What is this? Rum. And that? Grape cider. This box? Rollmop herrings! And what do I see here, Ruzsák? Stand up. Would I be mistaken in assuming that those coffee beans have been purloined from your father’s grocery?”

Béla stood up, fiddling absentmindedly with his gloves.

“Wrong. I only stole money from the shop. I bought the coffee elsewhere with the stolen money.”

So they went on from item to item. Ernõ’s interrogation was thorough and formally impeccable. No one denied anything. They were all prepared to admit the provenance of every object. Lajos exchanged indignant looks with Ernõ. Ernõ’s cross-questioning proceeded slowly, with the sharpest questions addressed primarily to Ábel and Béla.

“Not a word, Prockauer. I shall have particular things to say to you. What is the meaning of this clown costume? Is this how you prepare for exams? How you prepare for life while your fathers are fighting at the front?”

“Excuse me!” Ábel exclaimed. “We are not preparing for life.”

Ernõ placed two candlesticks on the table and politely invited the one-armed one to take a seat.

“What is this nonsense?” he asked. “What else can you be preparing for if not for life?”

“We are not preparing at all, headmaster sir,” Ábel replied calmly. “That is precisely the point. We have taken particular care not to prepare. Life can prepare for whatever it likes. What we are concerned with is something quite different.”

“Utterly different,” Béla nodded.

“Hold your tongue, Ruzsák. You bought coffee beans with stolen money, and therefore have nothing to say. What are you boys up to?”

“What we are trying to do,” answered Ábel in his best school voice, “is to nurture comradeship. We are a gang, if you please. We have nothing to do with what other people get up to. We are not responsible for them.”

“There’s something in that,” agreed the one-armed one.

“But you yourself are responsible,” Ábel retorted. “You agreed to serve and have your arm cut off. People have died on your account. People have died because of Ernõ’s father too. In my humble opinion anyone who takes part in this is responsible for what happens.”

“You lot will shortly be called up,” said Ernõ coldly. “Do you think you will be talking like this then?”

“Naturally not. We won’t be talking then, we will all be responsible, but until then I feel no obligation to acknowledge the rules of their world. Nor those of the music lessons I am currently missing because of a faked parental note, nor those that say it is forbidden to urinate against the walls of the theater in public. Nor those of the world war. That is why we are here.”

“I understand,” said Ernõ. “And what are you doing here?”

They kept silent. Béla examined his nails. Tibor rolled a cigarette.

“Here we are none of their business,” said Ábel. “Don’t you understand yet? I hate what they teach us. I don’t believe what they believe. I don’t respect what they respect. I was always alone with my aunt. I don’t know what will happen now. But I don’t want to live with them, I don’t even want to eat their food. That’s why I’m here. Because here I can thumb my nose at their rules.”

“They? Who are they?” asked Ernõ.

They all began to shout at once.

“The locksmiths for a start!”

“The lawyers!”

“Teacher, baker, what’s the difference?”

“All of them! All of them!”

They kept shouting whatever came into their heads. Béla was bellowing fit to burst. Ábel stood on the bed.

“I tell you we have to escape,” he cried. “On bicycle, on horseback. Now! Through the woods!”

“You can’t cycle through woods,” Tibor remarked like a true sportsman.

They felt they were making progress. Now perhaps they were getting to the heart of the secret. Ábel was shouting himself hoarse.

“Your father is a great idiot!” he bellowed and pointed accusingly at Ernõ. “What have I done? Nothing. My aunt kept sending me into the garden to play because the apartment was damp. So I played there. Your father goes on about the rich. That’s not it: there’s another enemy far more dangerous. It doesn’t matter whether one is rich or poor.”

He made a funnel with his hands and whispered through it. “It’s all of them,” he said, his face pale.

“We will become adults too,” said Ernõ solemnly.

“Maybe. But until then I shall defend myself. That’s all.”

Eventually they collapsed on the bed. Ábel’s face was burning. Tibor sat down beside him.

“Do you really think it’s possible to defend ourselves against them?” asked Tibor in a low voice, his eyes wide.

IT WAS SPRING AND VISITORS HAD STARTED CALLINGat The Peculiar. The gang became more circumspect in their gatherings. Once or twice a week they managed to get away there in the afternoon but only on Sunday for a whole day. Occasionally they discovered people picnicking in the garden.

So far everything that had happened was entirely between themselves and they felt no guilt about it. They had nothing to do with the mechanisms, rules, and policing of that other world. The “other world”’s significance lay as much in not being allowed to smoke in the street as in the world war. The insults the world showered on them roused them to a similar degree of fury: it was the same whether it was being unable to get bread without ration tickets, the unfair marks awarded by the Latin teacher, someone in the family being killed in action, or being prevented from frequenting the theater without express school permission. They felt that the system that worked against them and dragged them back acted as perniciously in insignificant matters as in great affairs of state. It was hard to say what hurt most: having to offer obsequious greetings to adults they met on the street or the thought of having, in all probability, to salute some sergeant major a few months later.