Miklós Vámos: The Book of Fathers

As the evening dew fell, he shivered as he rolled on the grass, stripping the clothes off his body and picking clean clothing from what Zsiga and his companions had left behind. On his legs the dried blood had turned the bandages a rusty color; these he did not dare touch.

On the third day he ventured even further afield, down the mountain road to the first winepress, the one they had set on fire. Among the battered and broken flagons thrown into the garden he found two still intact, but could not manage to prize their stoppers out. He also found a few dried-up seed potatoes, which he gobbled up, raw, straight away. Eventually he managed to jam the neck of a bottle between two pieces of rock and thus break it at the neck. Though he lost some of the wine to the dry soil, most of it he was able to gulp down from the broken stem of the bottle. He was soon nodding off, no longer cold. Perhaps… somehow… it will be all right… in the end. Perhaps… somehow…

As he felt the strength returning to his legs, he was able to make longer excursions. From the ruined yards around he gathered up every scrap he thought could be eaten. Near the clearing the buildings were mostly winepresses, and Kornél soon acquired a taste for wine and spirits. At first they made him feel nauseous and often he would gag and vomit up the liquid, but it did not take him long to get used to it. The alcohol helped him through the cool nights. His hair grew and became as matted as the coat of Málé the dog. The better Kornél got, though, the worse Málé became, not able to find enough food to his liking. Reduced to lapping up the mountain’s nectar, he would get unsteady on his feet and go cross-eyed, providing Kornél with no end of amusement. Then, at night, he would snore like Grandpa Czuczor, a sound that Kornél loved.

In company, Kornél’s way with words had always struck everyone as suprisingly advanced for his age, but now, on his own, he had virtually stopped speaking. When he told Málé what to do, his words resembled the noises made by the dog more than those of his own language.

He learned how to catch the silvery dace in the upper brook. He lay on his stomach dangling his arm in the icy water just where the fish used to come to bask in the sun. When one swam over his carefully positioned open palm he would close his fingers around it gradually, imperceptibly slowly. Provided he managed to make this last an age he would suddenly feel the fish in his grasp. With a jerk he would throw it out onto the rocks, wait until the wet little body thrashed itself to exhaustion, and then crunch it between his teeth, spitting the fishbones back into the stream.

This is how he lived, his existence growing hardly distinguishable from those of the small wild creatures of the forest. His leg, which had healed crooked, made it possible for him to take firmer, more complicated steps, and even to run, if necessary, though his loping gait recalled that of a scavenging dog with three legs.

Málé’s nose would not stop bleeding; his teeth were loose, one or two had even fallen out. The skin under his coat had begun to fester and tiny parasites crawled around the wounds. Then one morning he could no longer get on his feet. Kornél called out to him gently: Woof-woof! Woof-woof!

The dog did not raise his head; he wanted to be left alone. Kornél could not understand this and kept stroking and shaking him by turns, barking at him with ever-greater tenderness.

The bushes and hedgerows in the village, which had perhaps never offered such a dense canopy to the fences, lost their flowers by the wayside. The air did not cool down at night. Even without having to drink Kornél managed not to feel cold. The noonday sun rose high in the sky and the hot cupola of the heavens hung over the landscape; only the sound of the church bells at noon was missing, and of course the sound of other people. Málé’s tongue hung dry from his mangled jaw. As he watched the half-shut eyes of the dog Kornél was seized by an uncertain dread that a fate worse than anything that had happened up to then awaited him. His breathing came in spasms and he continued to bark obstinately, with a childlike belief that this would somehow stay his doom.

Though it was only noon, the sky unexpectedly turned dark. Kornél gave a roar like a wounded animal. He could feel that this was the end: a blow more terrifying than any before would strike them and they would die like his mother, grandfather, and every other creature. There was nowhere for the emaciated dog to flee, and he too had no future. Kornél lay on his back, clasped his two dirt-stained little hands together in prayer, but the words that once he could say even in his sleep would not come, and all he could utter was: woof-woof…

In the sky that rapidly turned dark, the corona of the light-ball of the sun darkened by degrees, as if another, black sun were thrusting itself across it, each lilac-blue flame a tiny javelin stabbing the little boy in the eyes, which he then shut, as did the dog. It was the end, they both thought. Under Kornél’s eyelids were rings of fire, behind them shades of images from the past that he had never seen but that still seemed somehow familiar. Had he the time, he might be able to unravel their meaning, but thick and fast there came the throb of nothingness.

The doctor with the goatee washed his hands and proclaimed the verdict:

“The end is nigh!”

Mrs. Sternovszky buried her face in her kerchief. “What will become of us if…?” She did not finish the sentence. Her sister embraced her tightly, as if afraid that she might crumble into small pieces.

She drew away. “Doctor, how much longer…”

“I cannot foretell the future, but… not very long.”

“But how long… Days?”

“Days or hours. Who knows? I’ll be back at nightfall,” he said, and left. His fee was handed to him in a buff envelope by the maid in the entrance hall where the flowers for the patient were arrayed in vases of various size, their fragrance lying heavy upon the air.

The dying man was gasping for air. His wound had not healed one jot, though the doctor had doused it thoroughly with some yellow powder for the inflammation. He could see no reason to apply a bandage, but he did so nonetheless, just to comfort the relatives. In any case, it was better if they did not see the wound itself. The blade had penetrated just above the rib cage and below the collarbone, at an unfortunate angle, so that it pierced the lungs and very likely reached the pericardium. At this stage science can do no more, and all is in the hands of the heavenly powers.

Mrs. Sternovszky returned to her husband’s room and leaned over his bed. “My dear husband is thirsty perhaps? Some fresh lemon juice? Should I have the maid squeeze you some?”

He shook his head.

“A bite or two to eat? A light soup, perhaps?”

Another shake of the head.

“Does my dear husband have any other wish?”

A smile formed across the sunken cheeks: “Thank you, no.” And he closed his eyes. If only they would leave him alone in the throes of his death, he thought. There is no hope. If his misfortune were not the result of his own stupidity, it would perhaps be easier to accept. What will happen to the glassworks once he offers up his soul to his Maker? Will his wife be able to look after it and make it prosper? He heard news that the smelting ovens were not working, and this distressed him. Just because I’m dying there is no reason to let the fire go out! But the master glassmaker, Imre Farkas junior, who should have had charge of production in the glassworks, was then sitting in irons, in prison, because he had attacked the inspector. This Imre Farkas had been a difficult man from the start, too quick to anger and too quick to act.

A painful sigh rent his throat. His wife was once again trying to tempt him with food and drink and kind words. Once again he did not tell her to go. It is the right of one’s wife to be there when… yes. He tried to work out what day it was, the twentieth or the twenty-first of March, but he was confused about the time and the day. All his life he had been acutely sensitive to the year, the season, the week, even the day and the hour. He often amazed his wife and children by his accurate recall of, say, the date of the great fall of snow in Felvincz: the nineteenth day of January in the year of our lord 1738, and he even knew they had been snowed in until the twenty-eighth.