Sandor Marai - The Rebels

She was sweeping the remnant of a pack of cards from under the table: he suddenly remembered he had no money. Searching his various pockets he found just three crowns, and couldn’t understand it at first for his aunt had handed him twenty crowns in the morning before he set off for his exams. Under normal circumstances this would have constituted a healthy sum and he had to stop for a moment and recall what he had spent it on. After his aunt’s celebratory dinner they had started a game of Ramsli with the German “William Tell” pack and he had lost. His memory of it was somewhat blurry, but he seemed to recall he did not want to play but someone—was it Tibor? was it Ernõ?—made him. He stuffed the remaining money into his pocket and told the girl not to expect him for supper because he might be home late. He stopped in the doorway. One of the pack, an ace of hearts, lay on the threshold so he absentmindedly picked up the greasy and none too clean card, the rest of the pack being strewn on the table where the maid had deposited them. The top card there was another ace of hearts. He reached for it carefully with two fingers and examined it, turned it this way and that way, comparing it with the one he had found on the threshold. In the packs supplied by Piatnik there was usually only one ace of hearts. The two aces looked equally greasy, spotty, and well-used, inviting confidence, both with similar blue backs. He sat down at the table and sorted the pack into its four suits. He discovered two acorn aces as well, and two tens, one of leaves and one of bells. The four cards represented four winners at vingt-etun. After Ramsli they would often go on to play vingt-etun. The doubled cards were exactly like all the others in the pack. The cheat had been careful: they might have been using the pack for months by now. In any case the cards were foolproof. He himself had fished out the pack from a drawer in his father’s writing desk. It was a very old, much-used pack.

HE POCKETED THE CARDS. HE WENT OVER TOhis father’s room. People know the precise moment when they leave a place forever, a room, for example, where they have spent a long time. There was no thought in his head but he stood on the threshold and looked back. His mother had had this room at one time. Three generations of his family had occupied the house and this room had always been the women and children’s room. It might have been because of these bright feminine furnishings: the light-colored cherrywood furniture, the low arches under which there swam the constant odors of childhood illnesses, of chamomile tea, violet-root, almond-flavored milk, and baby food. His mother had spent a very short time, perhaps only some three years, in the house, but all those highly potent oriental scents, so powerful that it was enough to leave one bottle unstoppered for a day for the room to be saturated with them for years, like the memory of her own presence, completely filling the house. Certain objects continued living their taboo lives: his mother’s glass, her sewing table, her pincushion survived as if in a bell jar, separated out, though this was something they never spoke about. He couldn’t think of his mother as anything but a very frail, much younger elder sister, and he knew that this early-departed woman lived in his father’s memory the same way. He looked back at the room where he had spent his childhood, where he had been born, where his mother had died. He switched off the light.

In the low light of the streetlamp his father’s current room felt like someone had been buried there, quite recently, someone whose memory the survivors did not dare disturb. There was something trancelike about the condition of the objects, the way the belongings of the dead remain frozen, rather as in a museum. True, his father was still alive, and was at this very moment standing at the operating table of a field hospital, sawing off a leg. Or maybe he was smoking a cigarette in his room, tugging at his beard with one hand, taking off his glasses. For the sake of piety and tidiness Etelka had covered the operating table in the room with a crocheted cloth, and the old surgical chair had taken on the appearance of an unfashionable rocking chair. He didn’t light the lamp. He stood in the doorway, his hands deep in his pockets, his perspiring fingers toying with the cards. A great tide of heat rolled through him. The card parties had started at Christmas when the gang first broke out in a fever of ungovernable anxiety that had dominated their lives ever since. It was possible that someone had cheated in that first moment: he himself had certainly been losing constantly since then. His tutorial fees, the aunt’s little contributions, the sums his father occasionally sent, everything. Was it the winning individual who was the cheat? Perhaps it was precisely the opposite, the loser who had started cheating, now, near the end? He saw their three faces before him and closed his eyes.

In recent days he had been keenly aware of the figure of his father. His father had come to his bedside in dreams and leaned over him with his sad, solemn eyes. Naturally, everyone had a father. Everyone was born somewhere. How much is it possible to know of such things? Perhaps, once all this was over, if he was still alive, when he had developed a portly belly and grown a mustache, he would be walking down a foreign street and would suddenly have to stop because there was his father coming towards him with a face that was swelling to monstrous size as faces in the cinema tended to do, taking on superhuman proportions, and then, coming even closer, his father would part those giant lips of his and say something, pronouncing the single word that explained his whole life. That’s what would happen: he would turn up sometime in a town in the dark that was glimmering ever so slightly, then growing ever brighter, so you could see every leaf on every tree, and the gates to the various houses would open, people step out into the street and start talking. Finally one mouth would bend over another mouth and the eyes close, then faint away.

The room was chilly. The surgical instruments sparkled in the glazed cupboard. In one of those drawers Father kept his slides, sections of diseased brain tissue he had once written a book about and published at his own expense. Several hundred copies of the work lay untouched in the library. In the days just before the war started his father was no longer seeing patients, only the three regulars he had somehow managed to keep on from the old practice: the magistrate, the old woman with the constantly shaking head, and the paranoid Gypsy bandleader who would turn up in the middle of a meal and play the violin for them while they were eating. Father treated these three like members of the family. His invalids respected him. Usually they sat in this very room after supper as if they were part of the family circle gathered to pay each other unctuous compliments. The lady with the shaking head sat with Etelka as they both plied their crochet, the magistrate sat solemnly, ceremoniously, vaguely expectant, under the great chandelier, holding the boy on his knees, and the Gypsy bandleader stood by the piano, leaning a little to one side, his bow in his hand, his violin under his arm, in the careless pose adopted by many famous concert artistes. They could stay like that, silent for hours, as if waiting for something to happen, not saying a word while Father took no notice of them and examined the slides at the desk. At eleven o’clock he would raise his hand to signal that they could go. They would bow deeply and take their leave. It was rare for his father to say anything at these gatherings, and the three invalids’ expressions would be full of respect and an almost agonized seriousness as they turned towards him to acknowledge a chance remark like “It’s been a cold day,” then, having bent their heads, they would withdraw once more into a world of profound meditation. The woman with the shaking head would indicate her agreement by rapidly batting her eyelids, the magistrate and bandleader would frown and concentrate on the deeper implications of the observation. His childhood was full of such incidents.

Читать дальше