Gyorgy Dragoman - The White King

By then everyone was shouting and pushing and shoving like crazy, and they were scuffling too, so instead of going back in line I looked on from the middle of the road. Although I couldn't see the ironworker or Miss Ani anywhere, people were pressing toward the door with its two thick panes of glass, four or five of them were banging it so hard that the lock rattled really loud, and that's when I noticed that another worker had fought his way out of the crowd and started screaming, "That's not the way to go about it, I'll show you how!" and he leaned down and with both his hands he grabbed one of the drain grates from next to the sidewalk and picked it up, and above everyone's heads he slammed it into the biggest display window. Well, that huge pane of glass popped right out of its frame in one piece before splintering into a thousand pieces, sending the canned sardines in oil and sardines in tomato sauce that had been stacked in pyramids just behind the display window tumbling all over the place, and by now even the folks inside the store were at each other and shouting, I heard someone yell "Fire!" and then the other two display windows also got smashed in, and I saw two ironworkers lifting the front door off its hinges and rocking it back and forth before flinging it onto the road right in front of me, the glass showered out of its broad, blue-painted iron frames and sprinkled all over the pavement, but I saw that the rusty lock was still there on the door at the end of the ripped-off bolt.

I knew I shouldn't stick around any longer since I remembered Mother begging me not to get mixed up in anything, but all I did was step back a little as I stayed there looking on, everyone was jostling their way into the store, some people ran up to the window and leaped right in, and the shelves inside toppled over and folks started throwing canned foods and glass jars outside, someone was crying for help and somebody else, a woman, kept shouting that the store was on fire, and then suddenly this old lady next to me shrieked that people shouldn't be going in through the front but through the stockroom in the rear, because if they did that, they would find what the sales clerks were hiding back there, and by the time she finished, a bunch of people were already scrambling toward the stockroom door, but they hadn't even gotten there when the door was flung open and out stepped that first ironworker, he was yelling, "Look, just look and see what they're hiding back here, take a look for yourselves!" and he emerged with a big sack on his shoulder, he put the sack on the ground and shouted that it was full of genuine unroasted coffee beans, they could take his word for it, that stockroom had everything in it that they could imagine, it really did, chocolate and oranges and dried figs and dates and crates full of Greek lemon juice, everything, understand, everything, why, it was plenty itself.

In no time people were running out of the stockroom door one after another, lugging bags and bales and crates and oranges in red netting, while others were coming out the front, not only had all the display windows been smashed in, but their frames had been ripped right out of the wall, a tall thin woman was trying to clear a path for herself out of the store using a board from one of the shelves, and under her other arm she was squeezing a really big pickle jar full of green olives, and by now people were trying to yank things out of each other's hands, two old ladies next to me were clawing at a huge cluster of bananas packed tight in clear plastic, both of them were baring their teeth, and finally the plastic ripped and the cluster came apart, and as it did, a nice big banana fell right in front of me. I leaned down and picked it up, it was really cold as if someone had just taken it off a block of ice, but right away I stuck that banana under my T-shirt at the neck, and then I saw a man trying to put all these big bars of Swiss chocolate that had spilled on the ground back into a ripped-open cardboard box, and I began heading that way so I could get at least one bar for myself. Which is when someone started shouting, "Where are the clerks, where did they go hide, now they'll get what's coming to them!" and right then I noticed Miss Ani lying there on the ground by the front door. She must only have passed out though, because in no time she began coming to, and as she tried standing up, a thin redheaded woman noticed her and pointed at Miss Ani and shrieked, "There she is, there's that fat, shameless whore!" and then two people ran at Miss Ani and wrested her to her feet, and suddenly the first ironworker was standing next to her, holding this big steel fire-hose reel that's in every store next to the fire extinguisher, he'd already wound the hose halfway off, and in no time he tied a noose on the end and hung it around Miss Ani's neck, and Miss Ani started shouting hoarsely for them to let her go, she was innocent, she didn't do a thing, they should let her go, what did they want with her, and then all of a sudden sirens blared from the direction of Long Street, from beyond the bridge, I could hear them coming closer, and someone started yelling, "Let's run, the police will be here in no time along with state security and they'll take everything back," and then the crowd surged all at once, I was shoved so hard I almost fell, but someone caught my arm and yanked me up, and although by then everyone was running back toward Harvest Street, I could still hear Miss Ani screaming, "Help, leave me alone, don't, don't do that," but by then the sirens were so close I could hardly hear a thing, and not even I was about to look back anymore, so instead I started running home so fast that I could feel the blood throbbing in my eardrums and the banana sliding slowly downward under my T-shirt, but I caught the banana through the cloth and pressed it to my belly, and on I ran.

THREE OF THE FOUR SCREWS came out no problem, but the fourth wouldn't move no matter what, it did no good tightening the monkey wrench that Feri took from his dad. I sucked in a deep breath and then yanked that wrench again, but one more time the screw didn't even budge, all that happened was that the wrench slipped off the screw head, and then I heard Feri whisper, "What in your pop's prick are you shitting around for when the light might come back on anytime and then we're done for," and he said this as if I didn't also know that this vent we were in under the movie screen went into the wall no more than two feet deep, and lying there on our bellies, both of us were hanging out up to the waist, meaning that if the room lit up all of a sudden the whole school would see our asses sticking out of the vent, so I whispered over to Feri, "Leave my pop out of this, go give my ass a kiss," and even lying there like that I gave a kick his way, I think I caught him right in the side with my knee, I heard him swearing under his breath as I gave the monkey wrench another hard turn, and with my other hand I even yanked the grating with all my might. But it didn't move, the screw seemed to give a creak but still held its ground, and meanwhile you could hear everyone behind us in the theater shouting like crazy and stomping their feet and whistling even as Comrade Principal screamed his lungs out, he was standing there somewhere in front of the rows of seats, we could hear him really close to us shouting for everyone to stay in their places because we were going to sing patriotic songs in the dark, that's how we'd pass the time waiting for the power cut to end, and no one should dare to throw anything unless they wanted big trouble, he'd have us know that the electricity would be back on within minutes and the film would then go on, and he'd see to it that anyone not in their seat when the lights came back on would be impaled and hung in the schoolyard, and he'd personally tear out their heart, he would, because the time had come for the lousy bunch of good-for-nothing slackers that we were to learn once and for all what discipline was, and I knew that even while shouting, Comrade Principal was walking back and forth and panning the theater with his super-duper eight-battery flashlight, so I tried hard not to think what would happen if by chance he passed that light under the screen toward the air vent or if he tripped on our outstretched legs, and again I gave the monkey wrench a yank, but again the screw only stayed right where it was, and then I whispered to Feri that our crawling in here was stupid, we should go back to our seats instead, this vent didn't lead anywhere, there was no secret screening room here, we should just forget it, damn it, but then Feri elbowed me in the side and said I should go back if I wanted, but he for one wasn't about to give up, he'd stay right here because he wanted to see those banned film reels, and I should cut the shitting around and give that wrench a good yank already because the lights really might come back on any second. "So don't screw around," he said, and I wanted to say that I wasn't screwing around and that he could go to hell, but instead of saying it I decided to set the monkey wrench even tighter around the screw head, and after wedging my elbow against the wall of the shaft I yanked again at the wrench, and this time the screw head broke right off, all in one piece, so fast that the monkey wrench almost dropped out of my hand, and Feri whispered, "Okay, now we can take the grating off, but careful, there's hardly any room," and I whispered back that he should say something I didn't know already, and I kept pulling hard at the grating until it finally came off the iron frame around it, and Feri and I held it from both sides, but there was just no way of turning it, it was too big for that, and so we had to back out of the vent almost completely, that was the only way we could lay the grating flat, and meanwhile the voice teacher joined the principal, but luckily he stood a bit farther over, not right beside the vent, so he couldn't tell we'd crawled out, and then we set down the grating really carefully and slid it into the vent, and that's when I overheard the voice teacher say under his breath to Comrade Principal that if he really wanted there to be singing, then he should be so kind as to light him up so the children could see him conducting, but the principal didn't say anything back, he kept swearing away because someone had just hit him on the head with a piece of chalk, so anyway, we climbed back into the vent, slipped through where the grating had been, and began crawling through the narrow shaft toward the secret screening room.