One expects that much from one’s good friends, comrade Karakas, replied André Rott quickly, though with some reserve, considering the powerful man’s surprising statement.
It would be embarrassing if an ugly mole dug up the ground somewhere.
André added, without thinking, that he was afraid Lippay might be growing prematurely rusty.
Don’t be.
Luckily, Jancsi Wolkenstein is more patient.
I believe we’ll have to entrust him with a dangerous task, Karakas said, and as was the wont of powerful comrades, he made it seem as if he had not heard the warning about Lippay and the recommendation regarding Wolkenstein.
What’s your view, he asked quickly and sarcastically.
He appeared genuinely curious as he observed André’s features, now motionless with surprise. Of course he did not fail to notice that André feigned this surprise.
For once, two pros were talking to each other in this town. In the meantime they had both sunk into the rust-brown water up to their lips and were floating their bodies. It would have been impossible to talk more quietly or intimately. Which was necessary both because of the subject matter and because of the echoing bathing hall. Occasionally a splash could be heard from a neighboring pool when someone was getting into or out of the water.
The more dangerous the task, comrade Karakas, the more responsible one must be.
That’s right, comrade Rott, and then the glory won’t be small.
The timing is good, comrade Karakas, if I may say it like that, one can only approve.
Which in their professional language meant, if you ask me, perhaps it’s not too late. We can sincerely hope that our friend Ágost Lippay has not yet dug himself a tunnel underground and indeed is not a mole.
He would never have thought he’d be able to think of Ágost in such plain words, so that with such a simple falsehood he could avoid his own death sentence, or at least find a solution whereby he would not be the one to be hurt by the friendship among the three men.
He could not have imagined that the betrayal would be so easy, that betrayal was as easy as falling off a log.
Occasionally some dripping was heard somewhere, and then echoed loudly in the dark hall.
It wasn’t as if he were committing a serious betrayal for the first time.
But Karakas had left him no option. He wasn’t going to let himself be held uniquely responsible for this definitive solution. Or at least the weight of the responsibility would be shared. The undisguised strength of this little administrative certainty gave him a peculiar feeling. Not dizziness but raw joy. As if from the pervasive joy of perspicacity he was on the verge of fainting, feeling at once strong and weak. Like Faust, not only had he gained insight into the unmasked nature of the world, but he also proved to be more loyal than he had expected or hoped himself to be. A sense of his own grandeur was reinforced.
Because he was more loyal to the cause of communism and to his oath than he was to his friend, he was more loyal to his profession and his conviction, and because he succeeded in making this loyalty prevail over all his other feelings.
He was nearly choking with tears.
Which surprised Karakas. It was as if he had caught himself out.
At this moment, tiny cracks opened up on their faces among their various pretenses. They looked into the depths of their mutual source of joy. Another drop dripped from the dark, cold medieval cupola.
I betrayed him, Rott rejoiced to himself. And he rejoiced exuberantly, as if this had happened for the first time, as if in the past he had not worked a long time as a mole for the British secret service.
But that was an institution and this was a bosom buddy.
He had to utter the magic word to himself, because otherwise he could not have comprehended that betrayal becomes not a moral weight but a physical relief. And he can thank this physically rather repulsive male person for it, for lifting the oppressive burden of procrastination off his shoulders. There was no way back, he too no longer had any secrets; they had let him know that they knew everything about him that had been or could be known, he had no place to hide.
Like a crevice in a rock that remains open to the destructive light.
Karakas raised his eyebrows almost involuntarily, a sign of his wonder and amazement, and, to keep Rott from seeing this, made the most telling possible move: he ducked his head again in the hot water.
Oh, he did not wish to conceal himself; he wanted to spare Rott from his own shame.
At the moment of betrayal Rott was finding pleasure in himself, however, exactly as he had during his darkest inner struggles and amorous confusions, from which he had fled to secret drinking and solitary binges. Once again he broke free of terrible fears and trembling and of lovely childish delusions. In his childhood they had warned him that betraying someone was to throw oneself into a kind of moral abyss, caught in morality’s whirlpool, from which there was no way back. And once again it was proved that this was not so. I am the abyss; I am the whirlpool. He could be glad of this, because it was something he had known for a long time. A living person had become free of the burden of a friend once lovingly bound to him. Whom until then he had tied to himself, to whom else, and whom now he nevertheless set free, hoping for the liberation of them both. He could be thankful to providence. Let him go. The feeling, the knowledge offered a stronger pleasure than lovemaking because, finally, another human life was no longer tied to human organs, skin, smells, or gestures, and had no perishable juices.
He had to feel himself light, airy.
Now anything could happen.
He had nothing to do with him, and this suddenly rolled back and liquidated their common past. As if he no longer had any need for breathing, for anything, for eating, shitting, anything that earthly existence demands of a human being.
I killed him; and the sober phrase, the clear accounting, felt especially good because it was as if he were the sole possessor of this knowledge, even if meant that he had killed part of himself as well.
When after a brief yet substantial moment Karakas surfaced again, he said that Lippay’s mission of course had a rock-hard condition.
He laughed hideously as he said this.
He has to get married within a week so that he can travel in the company of his little wife.
As two tourists.
They will hardly need luggage.
It will be done. André nodded to this coarse man while keeping his expression, excited by joy, dutifully somber.
He was not happy to see the powerful man go so far.
But you, comrade Rott, will also have to create more orderly conditions in your private life.
And he sounded the same hideous laugh. Rott joined him, laughing at his own nonexistent private life, which the bathing hall echoed several times.
Even though Karakas would have preferred to sob and shout.
By now, he could see nothing on Rott’s face. Which did not fool him in the least. No stranger to betrayal, he knew from his own experience that Rott’s jubilation and fear were increasing as a spiral of self-gratification and self-admiration carried him away, with a phase delay.
Rott understood this to mean, however, that there would be appropriate blood money; he would get his promotion and that would be it. He’d have to get married and start behaving like a conscientious clerk, and to all appearances that is how things should be.