Sandor Marai - The Rebels

He is still handsome, thought the mother, his hair and brow reminiscent of the colonel. But his suddenly plump body and the awkward, uncertain movements of his remaining hand seemed grotesque. His voice too was strange: slow, drawling, singsong, faintly babyish and complaining, just as he did as a child when he wanted something and was not given it. He was sluggish and gluttonous. She did not dare send him out to work. She had to tolerate her twenty-year-old son idling away the day with his younger brother’s friends. There were times he put on his ensign’s uniform, pinned his medals on his chest, and stood staring at himself in the mirror in his mother’s room, turning round like a model, talking to himself as he used to do in childhood, completely ignoring his mother’s presence, as if he were playing at soldiers. He felt no shame before his mother nor did he answer her questions once he was deeply immersed in what he was doing.

It’s money they ask for, she thought and closed her eyes. It was morning and battle was about to commence, the battle that never ended, not at night, not even in her dreams. She tightened her thin bloodless lips. She had calculated last night how much she would give Tibor: five crowns for the photograph and ten for the banquet. She wanted to give him an icon too, the picture of St. Louis, the patron saint of the family, because the elder Prockauer was named Louis, after him. She wasn’t sure whether her gift of St. Louis would delight Tibor. All the same she extracted it from her prayerbook and put it out ready on the bedside table.

“Mother,” Lajos wheedled in his singsong voice. “Tibor needs some money.”

They had discussed this final two-pronged attack at dawn while they were washing. No one else could help them now. Mother would give them the money so they could pay Havas off in the afternoon, then they could smuggle the silver back into its proper place. Tibor would volunteer for military service and the gang would break up in the evening. No one mentioned the night that had just passed. Lajos had taken Tibor home, laid him down on the bed, pulled off his shoes as though he were an invalid, covered him up, and sat at his bedside until he fell asleep. Tibor surrendered himself entirely, offering no resistance. At night he woke, went over to Lajos’s bed, and, when he saw the one-armed one’s eyes were closed in sleep, quietly stole over to the basin and gave his face a good wash with soap and brushed his teeth. He rubbed at his face a long time, then went back to bed.

He lay restless and wide awake, occasionally raising his hands to his mouth to rub his lips. The bed was slowly spinning with him but there was something reassuring about the dizziness: he felt he had stopped dancing, in a moment the record would stop turning and it would be quiet, and they would be standing perfectly still, the sun would rise and there would be light. I’ll go to the swimming pool in the morning, he thought. He felt he had plummeted from a great height to a deep, very deep place, the kind where one could lie flat out, quite calm, because nothing more could happen and it was only that he did not dare to move in case he discovered he had broken his arm or his leg. From time to time he would put his fingers to his lips and smile in relief. No more harm could befall him now: he was over it all. Mother would give him the money and they could all go on living their own lives. I could recover, he thought. Once I’m away from here I will be well again.

“I don’t know anything,” said Mother instead of answering. “No one tells me anything. I lie here, helpless, I might not even make it through to morning, but you come home at dawn, climbing through that damned window. Tibor, my baby, I don’t even know whether you passed your exams.”

The fact that Tibor had failed, and the consequences of that failure, had completely slipped their minds since yesterday so now they quickly had to think of something to say.

“Where’s the certificate, my dear?” asked Mother.

The one-armed one looked around as if their mother were quite elsewhere and said encouragingly:

“They’ll give you one, you’ll see. Trust me. They have to give you one, no question about it.”

Tears began to roll down Mother’s cheeks. She could cry at will. Tibor watched her with a desperate indifference. He had got used these last three years to his mother crying each time he was asked something.

“They haven’t given them out yet,” he assured her. Mother continued crying exactly as before, her tears neither more nor less copious, as if some engine had been turned on and now had to run its course before switching itself off. Once she had dried her tears she picked up the icon and presented it to Tibor.

“This will protect you,” she said, sniffing. “I daren’t even ask where you were last night. I know you need money today, Tibor, my baby. I have already made inquiries. The photographer will cost five crowns. How much is the banquet?”

“They’re not giving a banquet,” Lajos answered. “They are arranging a May picnic.”

“A picnic? What a strange idea,” she said disapprovingly. “You’ll only catch a chill in the end. Lajos, be sure to take your coat.”

“Mother,” pleaded Lajos, “I spent four months bivouacking by the Isonzo, in a trench, in the rain. There’s nothing I don’t know about cold and damp.”

He stood up and put his hand behind his back, standing as the Prockauers tended to do, and walked up and down the room. Mother watched him timidly. It had been Lajos’s habit, as it was his father’s, to put his hands together behind his back and crack his fingers. Of course he can’t do that now, she thought with forbearance. She was frightened because there was no discipline now. Any moment now they might rebel, come over, and gently, without any violence, lift her from the bed, deposit her elsewhere, and fall to searching the mattress and the bolster, and there, before her very eyes, seize the silver, the jewels, and the money, her cries and entreaties falling on deaf ears, the boys triumphantly ransacking the whole apartment—and should she scream for help they might even stuff a napkin in her mouth to shut her up. Something had happened. She had lost her authority over the boys. She gazed at the various photographic images of Colonel Prockauer’s military career as if beseeching his help. It was, when you came down to it, easier with Prockauer. She understood that what wrecked a life were those unpredictable moments when a person loses courage, remains silent, fails to open his or her mouth, and allows events to take control. Maybe she should have asked Prockauer not to go to the front. Being a high-ranking officer he could, presumably, have stopped the war.

Every nook and cranny of the long room was stuffed with unnecessary furniture, objects to which the foul smell of the sickroom clung, the smell of isolation and neglect. This, the room in which Mother lay, was where they had to eat. Once, in a circus, she had seen a woman in an evening dress control two wild wolves with no more than a look and a whip. She felt she had to engage her sons’ eyes, and that once she had done so order might be restored: one flash of her own eyes would draw the boys back into her magic circle. But the boys avoided her eyes. The contact was broken. She no longer had power over them. They were silent when they entered her room nowadays. She knew this silence spelled danger. They had been silent for months. She was wholly ignorant of the reason for their peculiar absences: they did not share their thoughts with her. They were preparing for something. Maybe their plans had already come to fruition and they were only waiting for the opportune moment when they could rise in rebellion, they might even have accomplices, the maid, or some other person. Maybe they had already agreed that on some given signal they should seize her and pick up her thin body, though maybe Tibor could do that by himself while Lajos searched the mattress and the bed with his remaining hand. But they wouldn’t dare touch the ready cash she carried on her own body, she quickly thought. She clenched her hands. She felt the onset of fear and started shivering.