Maja wanted to gossip, to see how I'd react to this new development, and the excuse came in handy, since I'd been looking for a way to patch things up between us, so I went over and pretended to be not the least interested in what was going on between Livia and Krisztián; we also decided that in the future we wouldn't talk about important things over the telephone, because if her father was told to listen in on certain phone conversations and if there was indeed such a listening device, then quite possibly our phones were tapped, too.
On my way out I saw Kálmán standing outside the front door; he turned red and said he just happened to be passing by — from the time of that incident we all began to see through one another's lies, yet stubbornly went on lying — and Kálmán and I walked home together, because he couldn't find an acceptable excuse for staying, having to be consistent in his lie; on the way I found out he had made up with Prém and Krisztián, the opportunity for which had been provided by the military maps Krisztián had left at his house; in short, by summer's end, slowly, not quite smoothly, and in a somewhat altered configuration, the old relationships were more or less re-established, but they could never regain the strength of the old closeness, no longer had the old flavor and fervor.
In his clever, cunning reasoning, Krisztián went so far as to call what happened that afternoon in the woods a piece of theater, and by using that phrase he tamed it; what's more, he planned more performances on the original site: we'd clear away the bushes under the flat rock, that's where the stage would be, and the girls would sew the costumes; at first he wanted to leave me out of the production, but the girls wouldn't let him — it seemed that even our differences meant something to them — so he finally relented and suggested I write the text; twice I went over to his house to discuss the details, but we only ended up fighting again, then he decided we didn't need any text; he wanted to do something dealing with war and I had a love story in mind, which doubtless resembled too closely our real-life situation; by stubbornly insisting on my version, I talked myself out of a job, because the girls far preferred playing amazonlike warriors to inamoratas.
The afternoon I visited her, Maja was getting ready to go to a rehearsal for one of these performances — I wasn't invited — but of course there could be no more performances, not after that unique, true performance born of a series of coincidences, the one we'd do well to forget; subsequent ones were prevented by other, strange coincidences, because without our feeling the changes in ourselves, our childhood games had come to an end once and for all.
But sometimes I still walked through the forest just to feel, for myself only, the thing we were so afraid of.
The following spring grass grew over the scorched spot.
And now, after what turned out to be a lengthy digression — so long that it's hard to tell what we had digressed from and to what — it's time to return to the point where we left off our recollections; it's to Maja's rumpled bed that I should return, to her open mouth, to her slightly alarmed yet hate-filled, loving eyes, as she simultaneously wanted and didn't want me to tell her what I knew about Kálmán, and there I am, unable to tell her what I want to tell her; desire, will, and intention falter and stumble on the strict dividing line between the sexes; something made itself felt, something with a will stronger than mine, like a law or an erection; at the same time, the mere mention of the woods was enough to make her lose heart, frustrate her designs, interfere with and even cancel some of her plans, and I could do all that without betraying my own smoldering jealousy.
That afternoon we were going to go through her father's papers, and there was nothing to stop us from getting down to business as soon as I arrived; her mother had gone shopping downtown, Szidónia was out on an early date, yet we had good reason to tarry: we were scared; now I should find my way back to our dark secret, mentioned only in hushed voices, I should tell about it, about how we conducted our searches, sometimes in my house, sometimes in hers, and I should remark, objectively, that it was more dangerous in my place, because Father knew all about my penchant for spying and snooping and kept his desk drawers locked.
It was one of those tricky locks, locking the middle drawer locked the rest as well, but the tabletop could be lifted with a screwdriver, and then the lock simply snapped open; Maja and I were convinced that our fathers were spies and were working together.
This, the most dreadful secret of my life, I have never told anybody before.
There were enough mysterious elements in the behavior of both men to make our daring supposition not altogether implausible, and we were constantly on the alert, searching and collecting evidence.
The two men had only a nodding acquaintance, or more precisely, we assumed they only pretended not to know each other well; we would have thought it more appropriate, and also more suspicious, if they didn't know each other at all; sometimes their travels — of unknown purpose — coincided, but we were suspicious even when they didn't and one of the men would leave just as the other returned.
Once I had to deliver a heavy sealed yellow envelope to Maja's father; on another occasion we both witnessed a particularly suspicious scene: Father was coming home, in his official car, and Maja's father, in his car, was on his way into the city; on busy Istenhegyi Road the two cars stopped, the men got out, exchanged what seemed like routine pleasantries, then her father handed something very quickly to mine; when later that evening I asked Father what Maja's father had given him — the question was a kind of cross-examination, of course — he told me to mind my own business, and laughed suspiciously, which I promptly reported by telephone to Maja.
If we had found a piece of incriminating evidence, like a cryptic note, some foreign money, a strip of microfilm — we knew from Soviet films and novels that there was always some incriminating evidence, and we went from cellar to attic looking for it — if we had found some tangible, incontrovertibly incriminating evidence against them, we swore to each other that we would report them, because if they were spies, traitors, we'd show no mercy, let them perish! and our mutual oath could not be broken because this mutual intrusion into our parents' lives made us fearful, terrified of each other, and so we kept searching feverishly, hoping to pick up a trail, stumble on a clue, get the thing over with; there was crime in the air, that much we knew, we felt it in our bones; and if there was crime there had to be evidence; at the same time, and equally, we feared being proven right, a fear we had to hide from each other because showing concern for our respective fathers might have been construed as a violation of our oath, a betrayal of our principles; so we stalled and dallied, deferring for as long as we could the moment of possible success, of possibly coming upon some proof positive.
The moment would have been wonderful, and awful; in my fantasies it implicated only Maja's father, and Maja behaved so heroically that only a single tear of anger and frustration glistened in her eye.
And that afternoon, in our fear, we got so entangled in each other's soul and body that we mercifully forgot all about our original goal, our secret, the solemn vow, and the search itself, although we knew we couldn't completely get away from them: our political alliance had revealed a mysteriously deep, to us incomprehensible, erotic pain and thrill which proved more powerful and more exciting than our unfulfillable spiritual and physical desires.
But to return, to pick up the thread of the narrative, even if my narrator-self hesitates at this point, and of course also urges itself to carry on, yes, please continue! go on! yet it fears, even today it fears, that the siren voices of charged emotions may lure it toward further digression, explanation, self-justification, self-exposure, an even more scrupulous unearthing of details, just to avoid this one subject! the analytical part of the self would find this justifiable, because without further detours it is even harder to explain why two children would want to denounce their own fathers, why they would suppose their fathers to be agents of an enemy power — what kind of enemy power, anyway, and who was the enemy of whom?