pálinka, the chairs, the dead flies — gave the bar the air of a ship in a storm in the early evening dusk. Kerekes opened the bottle, dragged the glass over with his free hand, and sat there for some minutes without moving, bottle in one hand, glass in the other as if he had forgotten what to do next. Now that everything had gone quiet, in the absolute dark of his blindness he felt as if he were deaf too, that everything around him had become weightless, right down to his own body, his ass, his arms, and the legs spread wide below him, and that any capacity he might have had in the realms of touch, or taste, or smell, had also deserted him, leaving nothing but the throbbing of blood and the calm workings of his organs to disturb his utter lack of consciousness, the mysterious core of his anxiety having withdrawn into its own infernal darkness, into the forbidden territories of the imagination, from whence it was obliged, time and again, to break free. Halics didn’t know what to make of the situation, and shifted here and there in his excitement because he sensed Kerekes was watching him. It would have been too presumptuous to interpret his unexpected immobility as a gradually unfolding form of invitation; on the contrary, he suspected that the dead eyes turned towards him constituted a threat, but however he racked his brains he couldn’t remember having committed any offense for which he ought to bear immediate responsibility, all the more so since in the hard hours, when “a man of sorrows” like him was plunged deep into the liberating waters of self-knowledge, he had confessed to himself that his comfortable life, which had slipped uneventfully into his fifty-second year, was as insignificant in the great rank of competing lives as cigarette smoke in a burning train. This brief, unlocated sense of guilt (was it in fact guilt at all? since if it was true, as the saying goes, that “once the flame of guilt has gone out it’s no more than a dead match,” the minimal light remaining is easily identified with some problem in the conscience) vanished just at the moment it might have penetrated his soul more deeply, which had entered on the next phase of hysteria, affecting the roof of his mouth, his throat, his gullet and stomach, all because of something he had prepared himself for far earlier, that being the arrival of the Schmidts and the settling of what was “due to him.” The cold bar only made the situation worse, and a single glance at the wine-racks piled behind the landlord’s low stool set his hysterical imagination spinning into a whirlpool that threatened to swallow him completely, especially now that, finally, he heard the glug of wine being poured into the farmer’s glass, and couldn’t resist looking, some greater power drawing his eyes to the tiny momentary pearls of poured wine. The landlord listened, his eyes cast down, as Halics’s boots creaked across the floor and didn’t even look up when he felt his sour breath, feeling no desire at all to confront the beads of perspiration on Halics’s face, because he knew that, for the third time that evening, he’d give in. “Look friend,” Halics carefully cleared his throat, “just a glass, just one!” and he gave the landlord a perfectly sincere look, even raising a finger. “The Schmidts will be here, you know, very soon. . ” He raised the newly filled glass with closed eyes, very slowly, and drank in small sips, his head tipped back and, once the glass was empty, he kept a little in his mouth so the very last drop might dribble down his throat. “Neat little wine. .,” he smacked his lips in confusion as he gently, somewhat indecisively, put the glass down on the counter like one living in hope right down to the very last moment, then slowly turned away and grumbled to himself (“Pig swill!”) before ambling back to his chair. Kerekes leaned his heavy head on the green baize of the “billiards table,” the landlord, who was bathed in lamplight, scratched his numb ass then started flapping at the spider webs with his dishcloth. “Halics, listen! You hear me?. . You! What’s going on out there?” Halics stared uncomprehending, straight in front of him. “Where?” The landlord repeated it. “Oh, in the cultural center? Well,” he scratched his head, “nothing in particular.” “OK, but what’s playing there now?” “Ach,” Halics waved, “I’ve seen it at least three times. Actually I just took my wife and left her there and came straight over.” The landlord sat back on his stool, leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette. “At least tell me what film they’re showing tonight!” “That whatsitsname. .