Her husband puts out a hand to stop him. “What do you think you’re doing?” he says.
Sure that she is there and that her husband just wants to prevent him from seeing her, István tries to push past him into the apartment. Her husband tries to stop him.
There’s a scuffle on the landing.
Mostly it’s just pushing and shoving.
And then her husband falls down the stairs. He tries to hold on to the metal handrail but he isn’t able to and there’s a strange loud sound as his head hits it farther down, and then he’s lying on the concrete floor of the half-landing, next to his wife’s plants, and he doesn’t get up.
István waits for him to get up.
It’s very quiet suddenly.
He hears voices from somewhere down in the stairwell.
When it’s obvious that the man isn’t going to get up, István starts to walk down the stairs.
His legs are shaking under him. They’re shaking so much that it’s almost difficult to walk.
He passes the landing where the man is lying—and where a few of his wife’s plants have been knocked over, spilling soil onto the concrete—and keeps going down.
On the floor below the apartment doors are open and some people are standing there. He passes them without saying anything, and they don’t say anything to him. It may be that they think he has nothing to do with what happened, whatever it was. They heard something, shouts and maybe the loud noise when the man’s head hit the metal handrail. They’re looking up the stairwell as if they’re wondering what happened. He walks past them down the stairs and out into the warm evening.
It’s still quite light outside.
He walks away.
He doesn’t know where he’s going.
He just keeps walking.
He doesn’t know how long he walks for, only that it’s already dark when a police car drives slowly past him on an obscure quiet street and stops up ahead, near a small store on a corner, and two policemen get out.
When he tells them his name they put the handcuffs on him and one of them says into his radio that they have him.
There are some oldish men outside the small store who watch the whole thing. They watch in silence as the police put the handcuffs on him.
And then one of them says, “What did he do? Steal a liter of milk?”
And one of the policemen says, “No, he killed someone.”
When the policeman says that the whole situation feels even stranger.
Later, at the police station, another policeman, a more important one, tells him directly that the man is dead.
He just stares at the policeman when he says that, and the policeman, who’s not wearing a uniform, who’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, says, “You don’t have anything to say?”
Probably he doesn’t even seem surprised and the policeman says, “You knew he was dead, didn’t you?”
He shakes his head.
And the policeman asks him why he left the building then, if he didn’t know that the man was dead, why he didn’t call an ambulance.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“You don’t know?” the policeman says. “You don’t know why you didn’t call an ambulance? People might think that if it was an accident you would have called an ambulance.”
It’s at that moment that he understands for the first time what the policeman thinks—he thinks that he deliberately killed the man.
And in a way he starts to doubt his own memories of what happened.
He starts to wonder if he is remembering it right or not.
He wanted the man dead.
He did want him dead.
“You wanted him dead, didn’t you?” the policeman says to him.
And he doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t say anything.
And when the policeman says that he pushed the man down the stairs with the intention of killing him, he starts to wonder if maybe that actually was what happened.
He starts to have this feeling that he wanted the man to be dead, and then the man died, and that in some sense that went beyond the purely accidental he had killed him.
He did push him down the stairs.
That’s why the man fell down the stairs.
He pushed him.
And it’s hard to say what his intention was.
It’s hard to say what his intention was when he did that, when he pushed the man and he fell down the stairs and hit his head on the metal handrail and then lay on the concrete floor of the half-landing, next to his wife’s plants, and didn’t get up.
2
HE AND ÖDÖN WAIT IN THE COLD WOOD. It’s a winter afternoon and under the trees it’s already quite dark as they stand next to the car smoking cigarettes.
“Who’re we waiting for?” István asks.
“Just some guys,” Ödön says.
“Are we in Croatia?” István asks, a minute later.
Ödön shrugs.
“It’s fucking cold,” István says, a few minutes later.
“Yeah,” Ödön agrees.
After a while another car comes along the track, from the opposite direction. It’s a small Suzuki jeep with Croatian plates.
“Wait here,” Ödön says. “Keep your eyes open.”
He walks toward the jeep, which has stopped.
Two men get out and they talk. They seem to be speaking English but they talk in quiet voices and István can’t hear what they’re saying.
He can’t see them very well either in the dusky light.
He just stands there, with his hands in his pockets, feeling cold.
His feet, especially, feel very cold.
He’s wearing the wrong sort of shoes.
He looks down at them, and at the half-frozen mud of the track.
About a week ago he ran into Ödön in the town. He knew him slightly from the young offenders’ institution. Ödön seemed pleased to see him and asked did he want to earn some money. István asked him what he meant. Ödön explained that he had to pick up some stuff in Croatia and needed someone to go with him.
“Why?” István asked.
“To watch my back.”
“What stuff?” István asked.
“Whatever. That’s not important.”
“Why do you need someone to watch your back?”
“So that I feel safe.”
“Why wouldn’t you feel safe?”
“I’d feel safer with someone like you with me.”
“What do you mean, someone like me?”
“You know what I mean,” Ödön said.
And it’s true that István had made a sort of name for himself in the institution. Like everyone in there he had to look out for himself. There were some fights. He had an aptitude for fighting, he discovered.
That’s probably what Ödön was talking about.
When he told István how much he would pay him, István said he would do it.
And now he’s here, in the cold wood, hugging himself and trying to hear what Ödön is saying to those two men about fifty meters away in the half darkness under the trees.
Ödön comes back with a bag, a sort of nylon sports holdall. He puts it in the car and then reverses along the track, the way they came.
“What is it?” István asks, blowing into his hands. “Drugs?”
“Whatever,” Ödön mutters. He’s twisted around in his seat, reversing along the track, which is too narrow for him to turn in.
It’s nearly dark now.
When they reach the main road—which is itself just a quiet two-lane thing without any traffic—he puts the headlights on.
They drive back to the town and then to a part of it that István doesn’t know very well. A few years ago it was mostly vineyards and fields. Now there are more and more houses on the hillside. They stop at one of them and István waits in the car while Ödön rings the doorbell.
“Who lives there?” István asks him, when he returns without the holdall.
“I don’t know,” Ödön says.
He pays István his money and drives him home.
They do the same thing a few more times that winter, and for a while István has money.
He mostly spends it on going out, although the town’s nightlife is very limited. The main place is Jungle.