A loud scream went up from among the trees, Krisztián's; like an echo, the reply came from the other side of the clearing, Prém's; then Kálmán began to scream, and I also heard myself screaming.
With this exultant harmonious battle cry, blasting through the still raging wind, we swooped down on the girls, Krisztián and Prém advancing from either end of the clearing; with sounds of crashing and crackling we hurled ourselves forward, dirt rolling down and stones flying in our wake; to the girls it must have seemed not that they were being surrounded by four different screams but that they were being hit by a single elemental blow of nature.
The flames tore swiftly into the dry twigs, the wind immediately stirred up the light, darting tongues, blowing them out in long stretches, then sucking them in again; Maja threw away the matches and ran to the other two for cover and then back again; the girls sprang up, and by the time we got there, the whole pile was ablaze.
The three girls took off in three different directions, but they were surrounded, had no escape; without knowing why, I went after Hédi, Kálmán chased Maja, and both Krisztián and Prém went after Livia, who was off like a shot; Hédi was running down the hill, one of her sandals flew off her foot, which she ignored, she threw her head back, her blond hair streaming in the wind, the white sheet sweeping the ground after her; I thought of stepping on the sheet and making her trip, and I didn't know what was happening behind us, the only thing I saw was that Maja had almost got to the trees when Kálmán managed to grab her; just then Livia began to squeal and scream so loudly — and there was no playacting in that — that Hédi abruptly changed direction and, while my momentum stupidly made me run past her, had time to swerve around and start running back up the hill to help Livia.
They were entangled in one whirling mass, twisting and grappling on the ground, the wind whipping long flames over them; like a lunatic, Hédi threw herself on them, screaming, perhaps to let the struggling Livia know she was there, ready to help, and I threw myself on top of Hédi, even though at that moment I could already see what was happening: they were pulling off Livia's red skirt, there it was under Krisztián's knees. It couldn't have been hard to get the skirt off, it was held only by an elastic at the waist, but now it looked as though they wanted to tear off her blouse; while Krisztián used his knees to pin down Livia's naked lower body to keep her from kicking, Prém, kneeling above her head, was trying to restrain her flailing, protective arms and get the blouse off; the completely incredible circumstance that Prém had no underpants on I noticed only at the very moment I was jumping on Hédi's back; Livia kept her eyes shut tight and kept on screaming; above her face, directly above her face, dangled Prém's famed member, flapping, swinging, swaying to the tune of the furious struggle, almost touching her face.
And even though I saw this, I still wanted to help the boys; I tried to get Hédi off Krisztián's back, which wasn't easy, since she was now scratching and biting.
In the end, this rather dubious help from me was totally superfluous, because as soon as Krisztián sensed that Hédi was on his back, clinging to him and sinking her nails into his shoulder, he let go of Livia and with one violent jerk of his back threw Hédi off, so powerfully that she slid down and turned over; Prém stopped, too, but when Livia tried to slither out from under him, he once more snatched at her blouse; I don't know whether the buttons had been ripped off earlier or popped off now as she sprang up and fled, but in any case her breasts were visible; Krisztián grinned at Hédi, something made him shake his head, his beautiful dark curls, and smartly feinting, he managed to slip away, because Hédi was again screaming and trying to attack him, while Prém started running after Livia — but actually to get his shorts, which he'd thrown away before — who, clutching her blouse to cover her breasts with one hand and her red skirt in the other, sprinted for the trees; Kálmán, who was just coming out of the woods, returning from his apparently unsuccessful foray, stopped, surprised, to watch Livia in her pink panties disappear; "You're an animal, an animal!" Hédi screamed into Krisztián's face, her voice choking, her scream turning into tears, but he somehow looked past this outburst, as though their love no longer mattered to him, his glance grazing mine, and I felt I was grinning just the same way he was; there were long scratch marks on his forehead and chin; he stepped toward me, we grinned into each other's grin, and, with Hédi standing between us, looked into each other's eyes; then he stepped around Hédi, lifted his arm, and with all his might slapped me in the face with the back of his hand.
Everything went black, and not because of the slap.
I seemed to have seen Hédi, who couldn't possibly have understood the reason for the slap, trying to defend me, but Krisztián pulled away from her, shook her off, turned, and started slowly for the fire swirling in the wind.
And I probably turned my back on the scene then and let my feet carry me away.
Kálmán was standing under a tree, looking at us impassively, Prém was pulling on his pants, and Maja was nowhere to be found.
Prém later claimed he'd been taking a crap when Maja lit the fire, but I didn't believe him; when you take a crap you pull down your pants, you don't take them off; but after what had happened it wouldn't have made any sense to tell him to his face that he was lying.
I also found out later that Kálmán had almost managed to catch Maja, but to get to her would have had to hug a tree trunk; he wanted to kiss her, but Maja spat into his mouth, and that's how she got away.
It took many a long week to get over this incident. We didn't go to each other's house; I barely dared leave our garden for fear of running into one of them.
By the end of that summer, though, things had got back to normal, more or less, if only because Krisztián began to hang around Livia, perhaps to win Hédi back by making her jealous or perhaps because he really got a good look at Livia that afternoon or because he wanted to make amends for assaulting her; anyway, he'd wait for her and walk her home from school; from her window Hédi must have seen them leaning against the schoolyard fence, engaged in conversation, long, absorbed, cozy conversation, for she complained about it to Maja, who, just to torment me, told me about it, on the pretext that she'd once again found something suspicious among her father's papers, something quite new, which I'd better go over to look at; she called urgently on the telephone, but in fact she hadn't found anything interesting or, rather, useful; it was a neatly folded copy of a memorandum in which her father requested the Minister of the Interior to confirm in writing that he'd acted on the minister's express verbal instruction when he had had a tap put on the telephone of a certain Emma Arendt.