seemed to feel the cat’s warm, violently pulsating stomach and the skin with its various lacerations and the blood trickling between them. She was choking with shame and regret: she knew her victory could never be made good now. If she started moving towards her, to stroke her, it would be in vain, Micur would just run away. And that this is how it would remain forever: useless now to call her, useless to hold her in her lap, Micur would always be at the ready, her eyes would always retain the terrifying, ineradicable memory of this flirtation with death that would force her to make the last move. Until now she had always believed that it was failure only that was intolerable, but now she understood that victory too was intolerable, because the most shameful element of the desperate struggle was not that she remained on top, but that there was no chance of defeat. It flashed through her mind that they could try again (“. . if she clawed. . should she bite. .”) but she quickly realized that there was nothing she could do about it: she was simply the stronger. The fever was burning her up, sweat covered her brow. And then she caught the smell. Her first reaction was fear because she thought there was someone else in the loft with them. She only discovered what had happened when Micur — because Esti had taken an uncertain step towards the “window” (“What is this smell?”) and the cat thought her mistress was about to attack her again — slipped by her into the opposite corner. “You’ve shat yourself!” she cried furiously. “You dared shit yourself!” The smell immediately filled the loft. She held her breath and leaned over the mess. “And you’ve pissed as well!” She ran towards the opening, took a deep breath, then returned to the scene of the crime, and used a broken piece of plank to prod the mess into an old piece of newspaper and threatened Micur with it. “I’d like to make you eat it!” She stopped suddenly as if her words had finally caught up with her, ran to the opening and pushed aside the slats. “And I thought you were frightened! I even felt sorry for you!” Quick as lightning, so as to allow no time for escape, she dropped down onto the woodpile and threw the stinking paper package into the darkness, to let the invisible monsters hidden there, ever on the look out for scraps, gobble it up, then crept under the eaves and stole over to the kitchen door. She carefully opened the door to find her mother loudly snoring. “I’m going to do it. I dare. Yes, I dare.” She shivered in the heat, her head heavy, her legs weak. Quietly, she opened the pantry door. “A thing that shits itself! Well, you deserve it!” She took the milk-pan from the shelf, filled a bowl and tiptoed back into the kitchen. “Too late for anything else, anyway.” She removed her mother’s yellow cardigan from the rack and very slowly, so as not to make any noise, she went out into the yard. “First, the cardigan.” She wanted to put the bowl down on the ground so she could simply slip the cardigan on but as she bent down the edge of it trailed into the mud. She quickly straightened up again with the cardigan in one hand and the bowl in the other. What to do!? The rain slanted in beneath the eaves, the lace curtain was already soaked through on one side. Carefully, uncertainly, wary of spilling the milk she started backing away (“I’ll hang the cardigan out on the woodpile and then. .”), but, suddenly, she stopped, because she remembered she had left the cat’s dish by the step. It only occurred to her what she should do when she returned to the kitchen door: if she lifted the cardigan above her head she could just about put the bowl down and so — finally being ready to move over to the woodpile with the bowl full of milk in one had and the deep cat’s dish in the other — everything looked much easier. Having control of the situation, she felt she had found the key to the tasks that lay ahead. She took the dish up first, then successfully went back for the bowl. She covered the opening with the slats again and started calling Micur in the pitch dark. “Micur! Micur! Where are you? Puss, puss, I have a treat for you!” The cat had flattened itself against the furthest corner and was watching from there as its mistress reached under one of the boards beneath the “window” and pulled out a paper bag, sprinkled some of its contents into its dish then poured milk on top of it. “Hang on, this won’t work.” She left the dish and went over to the opening — Micur gave a nervous twitch — but however far she moved the slats no light came through it now. Apart from the battering of rain on the tiles the only noise to be heard was the howling of dogs in the distance. Lost for ideas, she stood there like an orphan, the cardigan hanging down to her knees. She longed to flee this dark place, escaping the oppressive silence, and because she no longer felt secure there, she was scared alone, in case something might leap out at her from a dark corner, or that she herself might walk right into an icy extended hand. “Must get on!” She cried aloud and as if clinging to the sound of her own voice she took a step towards the cat. Micur did not move. “What’s the matter? Not hungry?” She started calling it in cajoling tones and very soon the cat did not leap aside when she took another step towards it. And then the opportunity presented itself: Micur — perhaps trusting the voice for a second — allowed Esti to get close, so, quick as lightning, she leapt on the cat, first holding it tight to the floor, then cleverly, avoiding those scratching claws, she raised it and carried it over to the dish waiting by the “window.” “Now, go on, eat! Nice treat!” she cried in a trembling voice and with one forceful movement pressed the cat’s face into the milk. It was in vain for Micur to try to escape, and it was as if she understood that all further resistance was pointless, because she stayed quite still, and its mistress, when she finally released it, couldn’t tell whether she had drowned the cat, or if the cat were merely “pretending,” because she was lying by the empty dish as if she were already dead. Esti slowly backed into the furthest possible corner, covered her eyes with both hands so as not to see the threatening, deathly darkness, sticking her thumbs in her ears at the same time because, suddenly, out of the silence a host of clicking, crackling, hammering noises homed in on her. But she felt no trace of terror because she knew that time was on her side and that she had only to wait for the noise to die away by itself the way a robbed and defeated army deserts its general after the initial panic and chaos, fleeing the battlefield, or, if flight was impossible, seeking out the enemy to plead for mercy. A long time after, once the silence had swallowed the last burst of noise, she felt neither hurried nor becalmed — she was no longer concerned about what she should do but knew precisely where to step, her movements faultless and properly directed: it was as if she was rising above the field of battle and her vanquished foes. She found the curled, stiff body of the cat and, her face flushed with the fever, dropped down into the yard, looked round her, and proudly set off on the path to the canal because her instincts whispered she would find Sanyi there. Her heart beat loudly as she imagined “the face he would make” when she presented him with the corpse that would be cold by then and her throat tightened with joy when she noticed how the poplars leaned over the farm behind her like old women jealously, scoldingly, following the path of the bride as she leaves them behind, clutching the dead body of Micur, forever extended, holding it by the legs, away from her body. It wasn’t a long way but it still took longer than usual for her to reach the canal, because, at every third step, her feet sank into the mud and she slithered to and fro in the heavy boots she had inherited from her sisters and, what was more, the “shitty creature” was growing steadily heavier too so she continually had to be shifting it from one hand to the other. But she wasn’t discouraged, nor did she take any notice of the pouring rain, and was only sorry she couldn’t fly like the wind to be at Sanyi’s side, and so she blamed no one but herself when she finally arrived and saw there was not a blessed soul about. “Now where could he be?” She dropped the corpse in the mud, massaged her aching arms, burning with fatigue then, forgetting everything, leaned over the seedlings only to stop in mid-movement, breathless, as if hit by a stray bullet straight to the heart, uncomprehending and quite alone. The magical spot had been disturbed and the stick they had used to mark the spot lay on the ground in the rain, broken in two where the carefully tended earth had been piled, the earth her imagination had dwelt on and cultivated all this time, and now she was confronted by just a hole in the ground, like a hollow eye-socket, a hole half-filled with water. She threw herself on the ground in despair and started digging away at the crudely scraped hollow. Then she jumped up and gathered all her strength to out-shout the night towering above her, but her strained voice (“Sany-i! Sany-i! Come here!. .”) was lost in the overpowering din of wind and rain. She stood on the bank, quite lost as to what to do, which way to run. Eventually she set off along the side of the canal but quickly turned back and started rushing in the opposite direction, but within a few yards had stopped again and turned towards the metalled road. She found the going slow and ever harder because her feet would sink in the mud up to the ankle, the ground having been all but washed away, have to stop, pull her foot up, step out of her boot then, balancing on one leg, spend time extricating the boot from the mud. She reached the road exhausted and when she surveyed the deserted terrain — the moon appeared for a second above her head — she suddenly felt she had taken the wrong direction, that it might have been better to look for him at home first. But which way home? What if she went by the path round Horgos’s field and Sanyi was returning by the Hochmeiss route? And what if he was in town?. . What if he got a lift from the landlord?. . But what to do without him?. . She dared not admit to herself that the fever had seriously weakened her and that it was the light flickering in the distant window that really drew her. She had only taken a few steps when a voice to one side of her demanded: “Your money or your life!” Esti let out a cry of terror and started running. “What’s this, little squirrel! You shitting yourself?. .” the voice continued in the dark and gav