9 x 16 s. @ 4x4
11 x 16 b. @ 4x4
8 x 16 w. @ 4x4
Owe. 3 c. 31.50
2 cases 3.00
5. c 5.60
He slammed the pencil on the desk, slipped the notebook into the ledger, slid them both into the desk drawer, rubbed his knees and opened the bolt of the steel door. “Let’s see it through.” Mrs. Halics was the only one to have noticed “how long he had spent in that dreadful room” and now her piercing eyes were following his every movement. Halics was listening, startled, to the driver’s loud story. He made his body as small as possible, sinking his hands deep into his pockets, so as to reduce the area open to assault, in case someone “should break in on us now.” It was quite enough that the driver should appear in this extraordinary weather, so tousled and excited (he hadn’t visited the estate since last summer), exactly the way some strangers in ragged ankle-length coats might enter a quiet family dinner to announce in tired voices the confusing and terrifying news that war has broken out, and having done so lean against the cupboard, drain a glass of home-brewed pálinka, never to be seen in the region again. Because what should he make of this sudden resurrection, this feverish rushing around in circles. He didn’t like everything changing around him: he took it badly. The chairs and tables had moved, the pale imprint of their legs remained on the oily floor: the cases of wine by the wall were shifting into a different order and the top of the counter was unnaturally clean. At other times the ashtrays “might as well be stacked in a pile” since everyone sprinkled ash on the floor anyway, but now, behold! Every table was bright with its own ashtray! The door was still wedged, the cigarette butts had been swept into a corner! What was all this about? Not to mention those damned spiders, that make it impossible to sit down without having to sweep cobwebs of one’s clothes. . “What do I care in the end. If only that female creature would go to hell. .” Kelemen waited for his glass to be filled before he stood up. “I’m just going to give my waist a bit of exercise!” he said and loudly groaning bent back and forth a few times, then, with one grand gesture, upset his pálinka. “Believe me, it’s as true as I am sitting here. The place suddenly went so quiet even the dog slunk behind the stove without even a squeak! Me, I just sat there, my eyes popping out, not believing what they saw! But there they were, right in front of me, large as life and twice as natural!” Mrs. Halics gave him a cool look. “Just tell me then, were you any the wiser for it?” The driver turned round in anger. “Wiser for what?” “Did you not learn anything?” Mrs. Halics. sadly continued, and with the Bible still in her hand, pointed to Kelemen’s glass. “See, you’re still on the booze.” The old man snorted. “What? Me? Me drunk? What makes you think you can speak like that to me?” Halics gave a great gulp and intervened by way of apology. “Don’t take it seriously, Mr. Kelemen. She’s always like this, I’m afraid.” “What do you mean, don’t take it seriously!” the man snapped back: “What do you think I am?!” The landlord dutifully stepped in. “Take it easy. Carry on please, do carry on. I’m interested.” Mrs. Halics turned to her husband, clearly upset. “How can you sit there so calm, as if nothing had happened?! That man there has insulted your wife! Can you believe it?!” The contempt she radiated was so absolute that the words stuck in Kelemen’s mouth, even though he wasn’t quite through with the subject. “Now. . where was I?” he asked the landlord, then blew his nose before carefully folding his handkerchief again, crease to crease. . “Oh yes, how the girls behind the bar started making rude comments and then. .” Halics shook his head. “No, you hadn’t got as far as that.” Kelemen angrily slammed his glass down on the table. “I can’t go on like this!” The landlord cast a warning glance at Halics then waved at Kelemen. “No need to make a fuss about it. .” “No, indeed. I’m through!” he retorted and pointed to Halics: “Get a load of him! Like he was there! He knows better!” “Forget them,” the landlord assured him: “They don’t understand. Believe me, they don’t understand.” Kelemen was mollified and started nodding. The drink had warmed him to the bone, his puffy face had grown red and even his nose seemed to have swollen. . “So, there we were, the girls behind the bar. . And I thought that Irimiás would give them a box on the ear then and there, but no! They were just like this lot here. . I recognized them alclass="underline" there was the driver of the firewood truck, two stops down from the forest, then the gym teacher from the nearby school, a night waiter from the restaurant and a good few others. So. I make no bones about it, I admired Irimiás’s restraint. . but to be fair, to be fair to him that is, what was he to do with them? What do you do with people like that? I waited till they took a sip of their blended, because that’s what the pair of them were drinking (yes, I tell you, blended) then, once they’d sat down at a table I went over to them. When Irimiás recognized me, I mean. . I mean he immediately embraced me and said: Well, my friend, fancy seeing you here. And he waved the bar girls over and they came skipping over like they were crickets or something, though it wasn’t table service, and he immediately ordered a round.” “A round?. .” the landlord asked in astonishment. “A round,” insisted Kelemen: “What’s so strange about that? I could see he didn’t feel like talking so I started chatting with Petrina. He told me everything.” Mrs. Halics leaned forward anxious not to miss this. “Oh yes, everything. He’s just the kind of man people tell everything,” she dryly remarked, And before the driver could turn round to face “the old witch,” the landlord leaned over the bar and put a hand on his shoulder. “I told you, take no notice. Meanwhile Irimiás?. .” Kelemen controlled himself and made no move. “Irimiás merely nodded now and then. He didn’t say a lot. He was thinking about something.” The landlord took a gulp. “You say he was. . thinking. . about something?. .” “Yes, quite so. Eventually he simply said: Time to go. We’ll meet again, Kelemen.” Not long after that I myself left because it was impossible. . I can only put up with so much bad company and in any case I still had some business in Kisrománváros with Hochan, the butcher. It was already dark by the time I set off for home but at the shambles I popped in The Measure. I bumped into the younger Tóth boy there, who had been my neighbor on the estate at Postelek. It was he who told me that Irimias, or so he said, had spent the afternoon with Steigerwald, the gun dealer who went broke, and that they were talking about some kind of ammunition, at least that what the Steigerwald kids told him in the street. So then I set off home. And before I got to the fork at Elek — you know the Fekete’s place? — and I’m not sure why myself, I looked back. I immediately knew it could only be them though they were still some way off. I went on a while but only so far that I could see the road forking and it was true, my eyes were not playing tricks on me, it really was them. They turned down the proper road without a moment’s hesitation. Then, once I got home, I realized where they’re going, what for and why.” The landlord leaned forward with satisfaction and kept a skeptical eye on Kelemen: he guessed that what he heard was just a part, a very small part, of what had actually happened and that even the bit he heard was probably made up. He had enough respect for Kelemen to know that the man was probably saving the best for later when it would have much more effect. After all, he reasoned, no one tells you everything up front, which meant he never believed anyone, and certainly not the driver now, not a single word, though he did pay considerable heed to what he said. He was sure that even if he wanted to tell the truth in a straightforward fashion the man was incapable of doing that, so he never assumed too much of the first version of events, merely noting that, “Something might have happened.” But what precisely happened, that could only be determined by a maximum, joint effort, by hearing ever newer and newer versions of the story, so that there was never anything to do but wait, wait for the truth to assemble itself, as it might at any moment, at which point further details of the event might become clear, though that entailed a superhuman effort of concentration recalling in what order the individual incidents comprising the story actually appeared. “Which way, where, and why,” he asked with a sly smile. “Plenty to be getting on with, don’t you think?” came the answer. “Could be,” the landlord coldly replied. Halics drew closer to his wife (“What terrible things to hear, dear Jesus! It’s enough to make a man’s hair stand on end. .”) who slowly moved her head to examine the flaccid skin of her husband’s face, his cataract-gray eyes, and low protruding brow. Close up, his sagging skin reminded her of those horrible slaughterhouses, of slabs of meat and ham folding in on each other; his cataract-gray eyes of water covered in frog-spawn in the courtyard wells of long-abandoned houses; and his low jutting brow of “the brows of murderers whose photographs you see in the national papers and can never forget.” And so, whatever momentary fellow feeling she might have had for Halics immediately left her to be replaced by another, scarcely appropriate feeling whose object could be summed up in a single sentence: