Gyorgy Dragoman - The White King

Finally we threw the last plank from the bed out the door, and then we grabbed hold of the gasoline can and struggled past all the stuff outside the door to climb out of the trailer, Mr. Vászile's son was still sitting in the picnic chair, he was scratching the neck of one of the dogs, and Jancsi and Csabi were flinging clothes into one big pile. When the corporal saw us with that gasoline can, he shouted to us right away to take it over to him, and that's when I noticed that he had another bottle of plum spirits in his hand, it was still almost full, and when we put the gasoline can down in front of him, he wedged the bottle of spirits between his thighs, undid the clasp lock on the can, took a sniff, and took the can in his hands, and then he let out a big groan, raised the can above his head, and dribbled a little of its contents into his mouth, but he spit it out right away and flung the can to the ground, at least a cupful splashed out, and he started shouting on and on about this fucking world, about life being so unjust, and about how his poor old man had had to scrape by on hospital-issue disinfecting alcohol, which was almost undrinkable even when you filtered out the blue dye they mixed in to keep folks from drinking it, and the whole time his father had been drinking this shit, he, his son, had been guzzling top-notch plum spirits by the bottle, why, even now his knapsack was full of the stuff, but from now on, he said, things would be different, and he stood up and lifted the bottle of plum spirits and turned it upside-down and splashed it out on the ground, flailing his arm so wildly while doing so that he almost fell over twice, and when the bottle was empty he flung it into the lake, and then he hobbled over to the small heap of odds and ends, poked at it with a crutch, pried out a pickle jar from among all the clothes, picked it up, and threw it over to Jancsi, telling him to go wash it out, and Jancsi hadn't even gone two steps when the corporal also threw over a bucket and told him to clean that too and fill it with water, and then he picked up one of the plastic bags and said yes, he knew there would be charcoal here that his poor father had used to filter that nasty blue stuff out of the disinfecting alcohol, and he shook a little charcoal out of the bag to the ground, stomped a piece to bits, and said, "At least it's nice and powdery," and then he went back to rummaging about the pile, picking up one piece of clothing after another and turning it about in his hands before tossing it back on the pile, and at the same time he went on and on about his poor old man, about how he'd loved objects, about how he'd collected so many things, yes, said the corporal, his dad had been so thrifty that now he, his son, didn't have the heart to throw out a thing, he sure had argued a lot with his dad about this, God forgive him for always telling him that all this horseshit is unnecessary, but for his part he never could understand why folks need so much junk when all you really need to make you happy fits in a knapsack, it's not like we can take anything with us to the grave anyway, at most only what we drink, but his old man was the sort who saw potential in every object, in his dad's eyes every single cheap, shabby piece of clothing might as well have been new, and not even now could he quite forgive his poor old man for this, and all at once the corporal fell silent and blew his nose again before leaning down, picking up a big canvas bag, opening it, reaching inside, and cupping out a little flour and giving it a lick, and then he scattered the flour on the ground and said his poor dear father had to live for years on nothing but grits, and all the while he, his son, was able to stuff himself silly with bacon and ewe curd on the plate next to his own grits. "Life is so unfair," said the corporal, but now we would hold the old man's funeral feast just like he would have done, with nothing but grits and filtered disinfecting alcohol. "As long as we couldn't be there at his funeral," he said, "then at least there should be this much, yes, in our own way we'll pay our last respects," and he said he'd now show us how they cook real grits in the hills, one of us should go behind the trailer to get some wood while the rest of us opened up the bags and the suitcases so he could finally sort through the whole kit and caboodle, so anyway, we then started scattering the clothes and scraps of cloth from the bags onto the ground and we opened the suitcases one after another, there were clothes in them too, but sorted by type, one suitcase had only shirts, another just had rolled-up socks and underwear, a third had stylish women's shoes, at least fifteen pairs, including some with really high heels, and another suitcase was full of ties and folded pants, only two suitcases had no clothes in them, one had the records that went with the phonograph, and another had a big leather-bound book in a bunch of crumpled old bank notes, and it said on the book, in gold lettering, AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD FROM THE BEGINNING OF CREATION TO THE FINAL DAYS, and when the corporal saw that, he threw aside the mud-stained winter coat whose pockets he'd been going through, he picked up the book and paged through it and told us that this had been his father's favorite book, when the corporal was a kid his father had told him lots of stories from it because history was everything to his father, but it did no good his father telling him all that stuff, he never could bring himself to love history, at most only the parts about kings. Sure, even his father had liked talking most about the rulers of bygone ages and about kings' funerals, about how the Vikings were sent on their final journey in burning boats, about the tombs the Egyptians and the Aztecs built for themselves and the priceless treasures buried inside them, and about how many servants they took with them in death so they'd have folks to serve them in the world beyond, and when he was little, for a long time he believed that his father was a king of sorts, who'd had to give up his rule in the interest of the people.

Meanwhile Jancsi got back with the water, and Csabi brought three big pieces of firewood. The corporal pulled a sooty stew pot out from under the trailer, poured around two quarts of water into it from the bucket, and splashed the rest on the ground, and then he turned the bucket upside-down, took a pocketknife from his pocket, pulled out its biggest blade, and jabbed the bottom of the bucket three times in a row. Next he filled the bucket with charcoal, set it right over the mouth of the pickle jar, and poured the blue disinfecting alcohol into the bucket up to the brim, and then little by little the filtered alcohol started dripping into the pickle jar underneath, it was black, like diluted liquid mud. The corporal wiped his hands, looked at us, kicked Mr. Vászile's old tin washtub our way, and said he'd ask us for one more favor, he wanted everyone to find themselves a rag and then to rub down the trailer on the outside a bit, not a whole lot, just enough so its original color would show, and in the meantime he'd set a fire under the grits and then we'd hold ourselves that funeral feast, a proper one at that.

The water in the quarry lake was gray and murky and its smell was pretty strange, I remembered what Zsolt had said about bones being at the bottom, so when I dipped in the washtub and it sucked in water really loud, I yanked it out almost right away, the water swirled around inside like a little eddy, but then I splashed it out on shore, and the second time I dipped the washtub more carefully, filled it up, and took it back up to the others. Csabi pressed a wrinkled necktie in my hand and I wet it, and then we all got down to rubbing the side of the trailer with crumpled rags, and Zsolt whispered over to me that we were lucky it wasn't the inside of the trailer we had to rub down, and I whispered back that I was worried that that would be next, because if it was up to those lousy dogs, we'd be here till night, but Jancsi whispered that then we could at least find the gold, and I said I thought I knew where it was, and I told the others what I found while cleaning, and Csabi said it was now for sure the gold had to be there in the quarry wall under the prehistoric reliefs, we just needed to get there somehow, yes, as long as we had to work our tails off like this, we should at least get something out of it. But Zsolt didn't say anything to that, he just threw his rag into the washtub, sighed, took out the rag, rung it out, and went on rubbing the side of the trailer.