Sandor Marai - The Rebels

His voice was feverish, his passion high, his hands squeezing his narrow face.

“It really was intolerable the way they lied and tortured and hid everything from us, as by right, as if their world were the only one that was wise, mature, and decent. It was they who dragged Lajos away and tore his arm off, I don’t even know where, and so they went on torturing us with foreign languages, with the higher mathematics, and with rules of ethical conduct, while all the time they were sharpening their knives against us…I know you’re joining up tomorrow, Tibor, but I want no part of them, I want nothing of Havas’s world or Kikinday’s world or your father’s world…I would sooner die. We rebelled, Tibor. We defied their laws. That’s what this was all about. That was behind the games, the pretense, this room at The Peculiar. We had to escape, we had to be revenged on them somewhere, hence this room, and look, the saddle and the globe…! I love you, but I know now that my love is quite different from what Havas was talking about. I am your friend because you are more beautiful, because there is something in you I shall never possess…some lightness, some crucial difference in the way you move and speak…I don’t know. And it was all beautiful, The Peculiar, the secrecy, everything…But someone cheated, and that changed everything. Do you understand? Someone has cheated and now everything is foul. Are you as sick as I am? I can’t bear it…”

He bowed his head and rested it on the bedpost, as if about to throw up. The door opened without knocking. Ernõ and Béla stepped in and quickly slid the bolt in place. Béla was already drunk.

“After the rain stopped,” he said, his tongue heavy in his mouth, “our superiors, our mentors got drunk as quickly as they could.”

ERNÕ STOOD BY THE BOLTED DOOR, LEANINGagainst it.

“Have you seen Havas?” he asked. He was without his pince-nez, his hands in his pockets. His voice was sharp, aggressive, shrill. Tibor took a step towards him.

“You stay where you are,” Ernõ ordered in a commanding tone, extending one arm. “And you too,” he said to Béla who was looking around, puzzled. “Stay on the bed,” he advised Ábel. “We’re listening. Go ahead, speak freely. What did he tell you? Everything?” And when Tibor moved he repeated: “I told you to stay where you are. If you attack me I will defend myself. I’ve had enough of punishments. It had to come out sometime. I’ve waited a year for this. No more superciliousness, Prockauer.”

He half withdrew his other hand from his pocket, then quickly slid it away again.

“Go on, Prockauer. Speak.”

His voice sounded quite different. It was as if a stranger were speaking.

“Have you gone mad?” asked Tibor quietly, mesmerized in the stillness.

“Ask me something else,” said Ernõ. “Out with it. Did he tell you everything?”

His eyes were constantly challenging theirs, seeking out now one, now another.

“You entered his den, did you? And was it interesting, Prockauer? And my delicate Ábel? How did you like it?”

When they remained quiet he continued.

“I have warned you once. It’s all the same to me. You can scream and shout, you can spit in my face, it’s all the same to me now.”

The silence disturbed him. He went on a little less certainly.

“I was there this morning, begging him to listen, to give up the whole thing…You don’t believe me? But he’s not human…”

He was thinking. Suddenly the flow seemed to have stopped in him.

“I don’t know…there are such people. That’s just the way it is.”

He immediately recovered.

“I will not allow myself to be insulted, I warn you, not even if he told you everything. I will defend myself, against all three of you, even if you bring the whole school, the whole town and the army, I insist on defending myself. If you don’t lay off me I will tell them everything. You can learn one or two things from Havas. He’s not alone, you don’t know this yet, but there is a considerable power ranged behind him and within certain limits he can do what he likes. If he takes against someone, that person is done for. He probably lied to you. Did he tell you some pathetic story? No? And what about me? What did he say about me?”

In his terrible impatience he was stamping on the floor and screaming.

“Why don’t you say something?”

“Is it true?” asked Tibor. The cobbler’s son threw back his head.

“It depends on what he said.”

“That you, and Havas, and the actor…?”

“What?”

Tibor sat down at the table, put his head in his hands, and spoke quite gently.

“It seems to me that everything I see here has only served to put us to sleep. Doesn’t it seem that way to you?”

There was no answer. He quietly turned to Ernõ.

“Havas claims that you used to visit him.”

“I have nothing to say about that,” said the cobbler’s son.

“But this is a very important matter,” Tibor continued quietly but intensely. “If you don’t want to answer, that’s up to you. What concerns us is your betrayal. Is it true that you told Havas what we were doing? Is it true that you told him everything, all we said, all we planned, about this secret life of ours about which no one else knew anything?”

“Yes,” he answered sharply.

“Good. And is it true that you and the actor…that you worked together against us in some way, and that Havas put you up to this?”

“Claptrap!” he declared vehemently. “The actor was a vain monkey. What did he know? Havas had him in his grasp, but in quite a different way from me. The actor was working entirely for himself.”

“But then it was—you?”

“Yes, me.”

“But why? What did you want? What was it all about? What did you think would happen once we got mixed up in this mess? What’s the point of it for you? Were we not your friends?”

“No,” he said very loudly.

They fell silent. They listened.

“Are you not one of us?” asked Tibor quietly.

“No,” he repeated.

He too was speaking quietly now, as quickly and deliberately as if he had prepared for just this speech, every word of it ordered long ago.

“You were not my friend, Prockauer. You were not my friend, wealthy Ruzsák. Nor you, you genteel beggar,” he turned with a contemptuous flick of his head to Ábel. “I would have been happy to be your friend, Prockauer, delighted in fact, like the others here. Now I can tell you because I myself haven’t been aware of it for long, that there’s something about you that will be a source of much trouble to you throughout your life…something you can’t help that draws people to you. A particular set of people. But I couldn’t be your friend because you are who you are and I am who I am, my father’s son, and I cannot simply wriggle out of that. I would like to have been your friend. Your mother was generous enough to give me a pair of shoes for repair that first afternoon when I visited you, years ago, because she wanted to help my poor sickly father. You gave me coffee, Béla’s father gave me bread and cheese, and Ábel’s ancient aunt stuck a jar of preserves into my pocket each time I left you. No one had to stick jars of preserves into your pockets when you visited somebody. Shall I tell you everything? A thousand days, a thousand minutes per day, you hurt me in such ways. No, there was nothing you could do about it. Nobody can ever do anything about it. You were all sensitivity and goodness.”

He spat.

“I loathed your sensitivity. I loathed your goodness. I loathed you each time you took a knife and fork in your hands. When you greeted someone. When you smiled. When you thanked someone for some object or a piece of information. I loathed your movements, the way you looked, the way you stood up and sat down. It isn’t true to say that one can learn such things. I learned that there was no money, no power, no strength, no knowledge that could produce the same results. I learned that I could live a hundred years, that I could be a millionaire, that you might all be rotting in your graves, in your crypts I should say, since even in death you would have your private mansions, not like us, we dogs who live in cellars and kennels all our lives, that even then I would have no luck because I would recall how Tibor Prockauer could simply give a wave, smile, and say ‘Sorry’ when he unintentionally upset someone…Whenever I thought of this I would groan in my dreams, scream and groan ‘Tibor,’ and it would sometimes happen that I would turn and see my father who had been sleeping at the foot of my bed, and he would sit up and nod and say: ‘You are suffering on account of the young well-born gentleman. One must be cleansed.’ Cleansed, yes. I cannot cleanse myself, but I feel a little more cleansed when I think how you too are in the mud now. And that you too will die. I live in misery, I set out from another shore and there is no way over to your world from there, there never has been and never will be, not ever! Locusts and bears, says my father. I loathe you all. May you all drop dead, but let me first torture you a little. You may deny the world I set aside for your torture but it matters to you. I cheated. I lied. I betrayed you. I cheated at cards too, I cheated at everything. Every word of mine was a cheat.”