He stopped for the first time on the bridge, and thought of those who had perished here before him in the icy current, but he suspected this sort of thinking was an infamy to be avoided; then he looked back at the island, but the thick foliage hid everything.
It was summer now, with all its living, powerful fragrance. The grove of young chestnut trees swallowed up the cries for help, or there never were any. The summer dawn was lovely and serene. The gas lamp shone passively through the branches. As if nothing had occurred in the night just passing, the first birds sang loftily. He was dragging himself, he could not actually run in his fine, pointed black shoes, which had gotten so wet in the puddles, and his socks made sucking sounds.
No cars, no streetcars, no one, no movement at all on the gray asphalt of the bridge.
Dawn’s first blush appeared in the sky over Angyalföld, at the edge of the clouds mixing with factory smoke. It became improbable, it turned into an improbability, that he had succeeded in escaping, that he had really managed to escape from the screams, the dull thuds of blows, the shouts and implorations, across the blinding light, and that he had not been taken away. That they had not reached him with their swishing nightsticks. Although the arc lights up here on the bridge were still on, the great sky with the birds was becoming lighter. Gulls were screeching lazily at one another, and swallows on the shore sent their brief shrill messages as they swiftly flew about. Yet he kept hearing the plopping and thumping of bodies being piled on top of each other, the falling of rapid blows; his conscience registered and properly sorted everything, he brought with him visual illustrations of arms poised to strike or raised in defense, melodies of futile begging, swearing, someone’s screaming entreaty, please, don’t hurt me, you shouldn’t hurt only me, comrade policeman, the sound of tearing clothes, the curses, the cracking of bones in upheld arms; in his own brain cells he salvaged and brought to light of day the sounds and sights of horror and reprisal, which couldn’t have been more contrary to reason or comprehension.
You just wait, you filthy fags, you’ll get it now.
In the unusual silence, he could hear the streaming, helpless plashing of water around the base of the bridge’s piers.
You wanted cock, all right then, you’ll get cock.
It was summer, an ordinary early-summer dawn with its cool mist.
He was dragging his injured leg.
The tight pants chafed the oozing wound; the shin smashed on the iron railing was burning and painful.
He feared that the rounded-up men would be taken away across this bridge and then they’d catch him too; he’d have no place to hide or chance to escape.
His black shirt and black pants, wet with other men’s urine and filthy with their sperm, stuck to his back, chest, bottom, and thighs; they clung to him, adhered to him like skin, white-hot with shame.
Only a few seconds before the police raid he had struggled to his feet from the stone floor, wet with water dripping from the cracked sink and the streams of urine that had missed their target, where, earlier, the men standing above him and intimately busy with one another had reached their satisfaction or had hastily abandoned him because of others’ stiff cocks; his body had been lying there, motionless, for a long time after its own gratification. He figured he would do it when he reached the geometrical center of the bridge’s span between the island and the Pest shore, where he’d have the least chance of getting stuck on part of the bridge while falling or of knocking against a pillar below.
That was his big plan.
He could see himself falling, but he didn’t want to see himself shattered or mangled, not that.
Before the police raid, his personal fate had given him time to stagger to the sink, which in the darkness he had guessed was behind the wide-open steel door of the pitch-black public urinal.
This open door turned out to be his great luck.
He figured that it wasn’t by chance they’d left the door open at night; they did it so they’d all walk into the trap.
He’d barely had time to slap some water on his face, just enough to wash the filth of others’ pleasure off his face, rinse it out of his mouth before going home, when the quiet night was shattered by the engine noise of the assault van, the screeching of its wheels and its spotlights; the policemen were already yelling.
To herd together so many shouting, whimpering men and then squeeze them into the open prison van waiting farther off can’t have been easy; if only because of the policemen’s quick, violent fury the job couldn’t be bloodless.
Huddled behind the open steel door, he was out of danger for a few seconds. But he thought that before doing away with himself, he should take off his clothes soiled by urine and other human secretions.
Should roll them up and make a bundle of them and his shoes, which later he could throw along with his shame into the depths before hurling there himself.
That the water should swallow it up, make it vanish at the bottom of its terrific current.
He would stand naked before his own death, with no way back, powerless to change his mind at the last moment.
He had nothing to change his mind about.
Ilona’s rice chicken crossed his mind, the leftovers waiting for him in the pot on the stove, nice and succulent, tasty with spices, unless Ágost had unexpectedly come home early, beaten him to it and eaten it right out of the pot. In this penultimate moment he was ready to develop a liking even for Ágost, whom he disdained because of his egocentric quirks, whom he could not bear, in fact, and who, with no consideration, would take for himself, and take away from Kristóf, every delicious morsel that Ilona put aside. Barely an arm’s length from his long-prepared death, he felt strongly the physical aversion that, given their shared family features, he experienced in his cousin’s company, the perplexing intimacy of familial aversion. On this night, however, Ágost had not come home unexpectedly early to eat his cousin’s supper but rather, lying on his stomach, one knee pulled almost to his chin, was sleeping peacefully and uncovered in the maid’s room of the seventh-floor flat.
At the moment before perishing, Kristóf wanted to understand Ágost’s crippling strangeness, to learn to love it as his own. But what he understood at most was that one is not alone even in aversion to one’s own body, because in family systems this trait too thrives in profusion.
He also remembered Ilona’s freckles and her pale little boy, whose fate would be no better than his had been. That’s what he thought about him. He felt sorry for the brooding, rebellious little boy and for his life to come. As if thinking that his own fate, which he was now leaving to these miserable survivors, might at least have someone in whom its cruelties would continue.
This child flesh will remain here, their common fate can rage as it pleases.
The idea that he might still have some of that rice chicken suddenly made him ravenous.
And another idea: that he would pass on his fate to the defenseless child, along with the leftovers of the rice chicken. Mainly, he was thinking about food because of the drop in blood sugar that comes with sexual gratification. The desire to stuff himself, gorge himself one last time. The way Ágost does; after each of his loud climaxes he gets up to wolf down something fast, eat jam out of the jar, be as disgusting as he is. If he were to stay alive, stay in this only life of his, the most dreaded thing would be his infernal climax, which the giant and his mustached assistant might somehow cajole out of his cool, insensitive body; he’d be an exemplar, a model to follow, yes, this is what you should strive for.
He should come back to them every night. Like two legendary heroes, outlaws, or highwaymen they had disappeared before the police arrived.