Sandor Marai - The Rebels

THE SQUARE SPREAD OUT BEFORE THEM, FESTIVELYlit with a thick patina of moonlight, the white walls of a few wide and squat baroque houses swelling and sparkling like the icing on a cake. The music whose rhythm had been swept with them through the revolving doors dissolved and faded in the solemn silence. The church formed one end of the square, oppressing the nearby low houses with its enormous weight. A light was burning behind one of the great casement windows of the bishop’s palace. The chestnut trees around the dried-up fountain in the small park in the middle of the square raised their compact little candles.

The air was mild, as heady as on a summer night. There was not a soul to be seen anywhere. The theater, with its high stage loft and graceless proportions, rose above the park like an abandoned barn, its dark, cobwebbed windows squinting out, half-blind. The town was in the deep first phase of sleep. A train gave a piercing whistle somewhere near the station, as if to remind the populace that it was all very well sleeping and burying your head in the duvet, trains would continue to come and go with their freight of silent passengers. The town was clearly indifferent to such reminders. Before the barracks two hard-helmeted guards went on switching posts at the gate.

The bishop sat by the lighted window in a high-backed armchair reading the paper. A glass of water and a box containing a wafer with antipyrine stood on a little table next to him. Occasionally he extended his bony hand towards the glass and wet his lips with a tiny gulp, then read on distractedly. The bishop slept in an iron camp bed, like the kaiser. Above the simple bed hung an ivory crucifix; by the wall a maroon-colored velvet hassock. The drapes of the window were of the same heavy maroon velvet. The bishop was a poor sleeper. He went to look for a book in one of the bookcases, running his bony finger along the gilt-lettered spines as if touching the keys of an organ, seeking for a note perfectly fitted to the moment. He tipped a number of volumes forward, then pushed them all back, picking out instead a thick black tome that took some effort to lift. The fragile figure took some time conveying the heavy volume to his bedside table, set it down beside the breviary and the prayer beads, opened it, and examined a few illustrations. The book was by Brehm, about the lives of the animals. The bishop was very old. He sat down on the edge of the iron bed with a soft groan and, with a great sigh, removed his buttoned shoes.

Every window of the hospital was lit: it was like a busy, prosperous factory on an industrial estate where work continued through the night. And at the end of the street, under the bridge, the great steam mill was still pumping. They made their slow way across the square, drawing enormous shadows behind them in the bright light. They stopped in the middle of the park where the harsh raw smell of elder from somewhere in the bushes assaulted their senses: it was as if it were physically touching them. They lit cigarettes and stood quietly, without speaking. That sprinkling of houses, lacquered by the yellow light, had been the backdrop to the theater of their childhood. They knew precisely who lived in which house; they knew the sleepers behind the windows. The gilt lettering on the bookseller’s sign had worn away. It was in these shops with their low doors that they had bought pencils, books, collars, hats, sweets, fretsaws, battery-powered flashlights, all on their fathers’ accounts, please chalk it up. They never had to pay for anything here, their fathers enjoyed apparently boundless credit, for it seemed to extend throughout their childhood. Behind the lowered blinds of the chemist’s window, through a small square-shaped aperture, a sharp beam of light showed the chemist to be awake, probably with company, ladies from the officers’ quarters, a few officers, whiling away the small hours with a little cognac médicinal. The striking of the clock broke the silence so violently the air was still ringing with its music after it had stopped, as if someone had smashed a very delicate glass. They stood around the elder tree, a cigarette in one hand, the other arranging their clothes as they proceeded about their business. The one-armed one stuck his cigarette between his lips, his hand being required elsewhere.

Tibor started whistling quietly. They walked beside the railings on soft, frail grass. The cobbler was sitting beside a taper in his little hovel, an illustrated almanac in his lap, reading the lives of the generals in a gentle undertone, syllable by syllable. From time to time he stopped reading, looked straight ahead of him, and ran his hand through his beard, moaning quietly. In the civic library, among its thirty thousand volumes, on the moonlit floor of the great hall, the rats were excitedly feasting. The old town had been infested by rats and a rat-catcher was summoned by the council. He locked himself in the theater for a few hours and by the time he had finished there were hundreds of dead rats lying on the stage, in the auditorium, and along the corridors. Ábel could remember the rat-catcher who spent a mere afternoon in town, ridding the main public buildings of rats and mice, then disappeared along with his secrets and the council fee. Someone said he was Italian.

A GOOD SPRING MOON TENDS TO MAGNIFY WHATEVERit illuminates. It would be very hard to give a proper scientific explanation for this. All objects—houses, public squares, whole towns—puff themselves up with spring moonlight, swelling and bloating like corpses in the river. The river dragged such corpses through town at a run. The corpses swam naked and traveled great distances down from the mountains, down tiny tributaries that flowed into others greater than themselves in the complex system of connections; they floated rapidly down on the spring flood heading towards their ultimate terminus, the sea. The dead were fast swimmers. Sometimes they kept company, arriving in twos and threes, racing each other through town at night; the river being aware of its obligations to the town, going about its business of transporting the dead at night with the utmost speed. The corpse-swimmers had come a long way and spent the winter hibernating under the frozen river until the melting ice in the spring allowed them to continue down the flood towards the plains. There were many of them and they had been there some time. Their toes and bellies protruded from the water, their heads a few inches under the mirroring surface, the wounds on their bodies, their heads, and their chests, growing ever wider. Sometimes they got caught up on the footings of the bridge where millers fished them out the next morning, examining with curiosity the official death certificates enclosed in waterproof tin capsules hung about their necks. There must have been a lot of them because they kept turning up, every week all through spring. If they happened to wind up in town, the editor of the local paper would publish whatever details the millers had managed to glean from the capsules.

The pine woods surrounding the town had been devastated by a storm at the beginning of the war, but the spring wind still wafted the smell of resin into town, and on warm nights it blended with the air to produce an atmosphere thick like pine-scented bath salts. At the corner of fishmongers’ alley the butcher and his two daughters slept in a single cubicle, the door to the premises left open, the moonlight lying across the sleeping bodies, and all along the wall the great swelling animal carcasses hanging on hooks. On the marble counter lay a calf’s head, its eyes closed, black blood dripping from its nostrils onto the slab. The old solicitor who was the last in town to go to bed each night sat in his study in a cherrywood armchair, the scarlet broadcloth of which was secured at the edges with a speckling of white enameled tacks. He had a clutch of dusty glass cases on his lap and was examining his butterfly collection. Several thousand butterflies lined the walls in similar glass cases, the solicitor himself having captured them with his white butterfly net and put them in a stoppered bottle of potassium cyanide. He carried the cyanide bottle and the butterfly net around with him everywhere, in the back pocket of his long frock coat, into chambers, and into courtrooms too. He had lost two sons in the war. Their photographs stood on his desk in copper frames tied round with black ribbons of mourning. But he did not mourn for them any more because he was old, because it was already two years since they were killed, and because in two years a person can get over everything painful. He was currently examining a row of Cabbage Whites through his magnifying glass, taking great care over the process. A tobacco sieve lay on the table, and a stump pipe. The solicitor had been a lepidopterist for seventy years now: you could see him in the warm seasons of each year at the edge of town, his white beard swaying, the long tails of his frock coat floating behind him as he skipped over furrowed fields holding his net aloft, chasing butterflies.