Which should not have touched him. He did not want to admit that his life had various mysterious processes and phenomena that he could not clearly see even in retrospect and that no sober reasoning helped him anticipate. He feared them the same way he did bodily contacts he considered improper. And when once again Bellardi did not show up in the afternoon, and Madzar was left with only the Danube’s enormous currents and muddy, layered whirlpools, he took off on a longer stroll to work off his anger with Bellardi.
He should pick up at least two bottles of good wine; that way he wouldn’t be going home alone.
At least they’d have good wine when Bellardi came.
North of the city lay ridges and series of hills, covered with loess and divided naturally by vales that seasonal streams had created, where even in Roman times grapes were grown and where, thanks to Levantine wine merchants, the very demanding viticulture survived the century and a half of Turkish occupation. At some places, the ancient wine cellars had long since caved in. Above the buried, walled-up medieval labyrinths sat small windowless grape-crushing sheds and proud, richly decorated houses belonging to rich Swabian smallholders, with wooden porches and tripartite wooden facades overlooking the river. He made his way up here on banked, carriage-wide roads between vertical loess walls. He was recalling in more depth and detail what once had happened to him and Bellardi. It felt good to go for a long walk after a full day’s work. As if he were thinking that with these pieces of furniture he might be able to make a present of his childhood to Mrs. Szemző. Recollection itself was not surprising to him; he has had ample practice in it. While working, one concentrates on the details of details, and parallel with them all sorts of other things come to mind, details and images from his life completely unrelated to his work. Except that now this was happening in the city of his birth as he walked along fences and stone walls, among raging dogs, or clambering upward in the grave silence and green dimness of the banked roads. Preoccupied with a technical detail, such as that something needed oiling, he would recall the giant willow that arched over the swelling river, in one of whose branches they had spotted the little cripple, look, there he is, reading, because he was always reading, taking his books everywhere with him, and in the next instant he would suddenly realize that the V-shape belt of the electric saw was loose, and so on; thus his thoughts kept chasing one another.
Or in the midst of having to deal with some quintessentially technical detail, he might think, we are the culprits, and he would brood on this if he could not suppress his memories.
Bellardi did not come.
He wanted to give up on him, but anxiety, aversion to the other man’s capriciousness, elemental wonder at the sight of this strange man’s behavior, and existential fear about the future remained much too strong in him. He won’t even have one car in America, let alone two. I’m a dreamer who doesn’t do anything. And why in hell did Gottlieb have to go to America of all places.
Why couldn’t the Gottliebs let him have that pleasure for himself.
He decided to wait for him anyway, to be prepared, and not to let Bellardi surprise him. And the telegram still hadn’t come from the head mason or the cabinetmaker telling him to come to Buda. He and his mother ate up, or gave to friends and relatives, the plum-jam tarts, morello strudels, and cherry pies; his mother kept bringing fresh fruit from the island. At night he drank the light white wines he had brought from the Süssloch or from the valley of the Csele river, from the Stricker relatives’ vineyard, sitting by himself on the veranda, in the dark. He wouldn’t turn on the light. But why should Bellardi come to see him. Bellardi’s life was nothing but a series of promises he couldn’t keep, not even for himself. What cause could they have in common, no cause at all. Yet Bellardi must have felt bad about having been so firmly rejected. But Madzar couldn’t imagine not rejecting him, how he could have been less rejecting, what he might have done so as not to reject Bellardi’s proposal. What part of the proposal should he accept. Still, the following day he walked out of the city again to get wine, taking with him an empty demijohn, sat around again with the old men he knew, sipped wine with them until it grew dark above the cellars.
If Bellardi comes now, he won’t find him at home.
Sometimes it rained for long spells and he could not go out for days.
Gradually he had to admit to himself that during the twelve years of his forgetfulness, he had not only guarded the safety and strength of his emotional attachment but also nourished it, kept it alive. He allowed his most secret images to return to him, repeatedly, mutely; he reveled and delighted in them. Even though, along with Bellardi, he wanted to forget Mohács. The place where unsuspecting people go to hoe their vineyards, tie up their vines or pound vine props in deeper, and then suddenly the ground opens up beneath them.
Collapsing medieval cellars swallowed up and buried many of them.
The Gottlieb boy sat on a branch of the willow tree, and they were throwing stones at him.
He could not remember which of them started it. First they lobbed small pebbles from the shore, and the boy kept jerking his sharp little head away from them, and the two on the ground laughed silently, writhing like snakes; they could not completely suppress their laughter but at least held back the sound of it. At first, the little humpback could not understand where the pounding pellets were coming from; both Madzar and Bellardi were good shots. Somehow, it was also part of the game that the two of them were so strong and well developed while the other boy was a pigeon-breasted hunchback. They left the little grub alone for a while, let him reimmerse himself in his reading. Then they bombarded him again with handfuls of pebbles, burst after burst, let him beware and feel the pain.
It became more and more serious.
Let him hold on to the branches so he’ll drop the book.
After a while they saw that the cripple understood but in his great Jewish pride pretended to care about nothing but his book.
They were no longer laughing.
With bigger stones they were more certain to hit him. The stones thudded on his body, then splashed into the water. No other noise disturbed the grand summer landscape.
He was still pretending not to notice the impending danger, as if he were absorbed in his reading, and he did not hold on to anything. But he waited for the next missile with his thin little neck pulled in, risking much. With the hard cover of his book, he tried to protect at least his face, but of course he was always late; they hit their mark well. He not only made himself ridiculous but ran the danger of losing his balance and falling out of the tree.
They’ll get tired of their lousy prank and go away; that is what he must have thought.
But they did not go away, out of spite, because they figured that eventually he would climb down.
He uttered not a word from where he sat.
Then let him stay up there, up where he’d climbed by himself.
We’ll see who can hold out longer.
If he made a move to sit more comfortably with his book, they right away fired at him. And they did it when he stayed too long in one position.
When another gang of noisy boys arrived to fish for driftwood, their enterprise could no longer be kept secret and these newcomers were certainly not going to let the hunchbacked little Jew climb down from the tree.
He might have begged the two of them for mercy, but not the newcomers.
He and Bellardi might as well go home.