Füles, the games and puzzles magazine, with which he tried to chase away those sleepless, endless nights filled with anxiety. . But, possibly as a result of the generally recognized effect of yet another emptied bottle of wine, his normally clear, methodical, organized thoughts suddenly failed him: his stomach began to heave, the “veins” in his head started pounding, and he was almost ready to leap to his feet, ignoring the babblings of these primitive “peasants,” and invite the woman to his table, when his excited gaze, roving here and there over the hidden promise of Mrs. Schmidt’s body, suddenly met her own apparently indifferent eyes across the snoring figure of Kerekes slumped over the billiards table, and the shock of her utter indifference seemed to cut right through him, brought a blush to his face and led him to retreat behind the farmer’s vast bulk so that he might be “alone with his shame” or at least to give up the idea, for an hour or so, much like Halics who — having seen that Mrs. Schmidt, though sitting opposite him, had not heard him, or, if she had heard him, simply didn’t want to hear his gripping account of long familiar events — abruptly stopped in mid-sentence and let Kráner carry on shouting and quarrelling with the ever more furious driver, but — “excuse me!” — without him, for he wasn’t going to get himself into a stew about it, and, having resolved this, he swept the cobwebs off his clothes and glared in frustration at the greasy, self-satisfied mug of the landlord as he made eyes at Mrs. Schmidt, because — after considerable thought — he had concluded that, since “shits like him had no place in the world” the profusion of cobwebs must be a new kind of ruse, part of the landlord’s guile. What an utter scoundrel the man was! It wasn’t enough for him to be constantly annoying people with his childish nonsense, now he had to make eyes at Mrs. Schmidt too. Because this woman was his alone. . or would be soon because even a blind man could see that she’d smiled at him at least twice, and he had, after all, smiled back!. . Given all this — for it was plain to see, especially with eyes as sharp as his were generally acknowledged to be — that there was no limit to the depths to which this brigand, this shameless exploiter, this disgraceful conman, was prepared to stoop!. . The man was loaded with money, his storeroom was packed to the rafters with wine, brandy and food, never mind what was in the bar itself, not to mention the car outside, and yet he wanted more! And more, and more. The man was insatiable! And now he had to be drooling over Mrs. Schmidt too! This time he’s gone too far! Halics was made of sterner stuff: he was not going put up with such impertinence! Everyone thinks he’s just some timid little mouse, but that’s just appearances, the outer man. Well, let them bring on Irimiás and Petrina! The inner man was capable of things they could never dream of! He threw back his wine, squinted over at his stony, all-observing wife and reached for a quick refill but, to his greatest surprise — he distinctly remembered there being at least two glassfuls remaining — the bottle was empty. “Someone’s stolen my wine!” he cried and leapt to his feet, glaring, but, not meeting with a single pair of startled, guilty eyes, he grumbled and sat back in his chair. The tobacco smoke was so dense now you could barely see through it: the oil heater pumped out heat, its top glowing bright red, so everyone was pouring with sweat. The noise grew louder and louder because the loudest people, Kráner, Kelemen, Mrs. Kráner, and when she had recovered her strength, Mrs. Schmidt, all tried to shout over the racket and now, on top of it all, Kerekes had woken up and was demanding another bottle from the landlord. “That’s what you think, pal!” Kráner stumbled forward. Glass in hand he was waving his arms about right under Kelemen’s nose, the veins on his forehead standing out, his cataract-grey eyes glittering with menace. “I’m not your “pal,’ ” the driver leapt to his feet, having completely lost his temper. “I’ve never been anyone’s “pal,” understand?!” The landlord tried to calm them from behind his counter (“Just leave it, will you? Your noise is enough to give a man a splitting headache!”) but Kelemen skirted round Futaki’s table and ran over to the counter. “Well, you tell him then! Someone’s got to tell him!” The landlord picked his nose. “Tell him what? Can’t you just forget it, can’t you see he’s upsetting everyone!” But instead of calming down Kelemen grew angrier still. “So you don’t get it either! Are you all stupid?!” he bellowed, and started beating his fists on the counter. “When I. . yes, I. . got friendly with Irimiás. . near Novosibirsk. . in the prisoner-of-war camp, there was no Petrina then! Understand?! Petrina was nowhere!” “What do you mean nowhere? He must have been somewhere, mustn’t he?” Kelemen was practically frothing at the mouth and gave the counter a great kick. “Look if I say he was nowhere, he was nowhere. Simply. . nowhere!” “OK, OK,” the landlord tried to pacify him: “Whatever you say; now just be nice, go back to your table and stop kicking my counter to pieces!” Kráner made a face and shouted over Futaki’s head: “Where were you?! And how did you get to be at Novosibirsk or what the fuck? Look pal, if you can’t hold your liquor, stop drinking!” Kelemen stared at the landlord, with an agonized expression, then turned to Kráner, and having shaken his head to convey the right mixture of fury and bitterness, flapped his hand in a rather grand way at the extraordinary ignorance of the man. . He swayed back to his table and tried to calm himself by sitting in a comfortable position but miscalculated, upset the chair and, dragging it with him, ended up sprawling on the floor. This was too much for Kráner who burst out laughing. “What’s the matter with you. . You lunk. . You big drunk lunk?!. . My sides are splitting! And that this. . this. . he. . he claims. . To have been a prisoner-of-war at. . No, it’s too much!. .” His eyes bulging, his hand clutching his belly, he managed to make his way over to the Schmidts’ table, stopped behind Mrs. Schmidt and abruptly gave her a big sudden hug. “Did you hear that. .,” he started, his voice still choked by laughter: “This man — this man here — he has been trying to tell me. . did you hear him?!. .” “No I didn’t, but in any case I’m not interested!” Mrs. Schmidt snapped back, trying to free herself from Kráner’s spade-like hands. “And you can take your filthy paws off me!” Kráner let that pass and leaned against her with the full weight of his body, then — as if by mere accident — he slid his hand down Mrs. Schmidt’s open blouse. “Ooh! It’s lovely and warm in here,” he grinned but the woman, with one furious movement, freed herself, turned round and, summoning her full power, struck him a heavy blow. “You!” she bellowed at Schmidt when she saw that Kráner hadn’t stopped grinning. “You just sit there! How can you tolerate it?! His hands were all over me!?” With an enormous effort, Schmidt raised his head from the table, but this being the limits of his strength, slumped right back again. “What are you beefing about?” he muttered and started a bout of hiccupping. “Just. . let. . hands. . go wherever! At least someone is enjoying them. . selves. .” But by this time the landlord had sprung into action and went at Kráner like a fighting cockerel. “You think this is some kind of bordello! You think that’s what this place is! A whorehouse!?” But Kráner just stood there, more bull than rooster, not flinching, but looking at him sidelong, before suddenly brightening. “Whorehouse! That’s it precisely, pal! That’s what it is!” He put his arm round the landlord and started dragging him toward the door. “This way, pal! Let’s get out of this shitty hole! Let’s go down to the mill! Now that’s what I call life down there. . Come on, don’t hang back!. .” But the landlord succeeded in escaping him, and quickly skipped back behind the bar, waiting, by way of satisfaction, for the “drunken idiot” to notice at last that his statuesque wife had long been waiting by the door, hands on hips, her eyes flashing. “I can’t hear you! Go on, tell me too!” she hissed into her husband’s ear when he bumped into her. “Where do you think you’re going?! Up your mother’s ass?!” Kráner immediately sobered up. “Me?” he looked at her uncomprehendingly: “Me? Why should I be going anywhere? I’m not going anywhere because I want my one and only little darling, and no one else!” Mrs. Kráner disengaged herself from her husband’s arms and carried on, stabbing her finger at him. “I’ll give you “little darling” and no mistake, and you sober up by morning or little darling will give you a black eye you won’t forget!” Though two heads shorter than he was, she grabbed the meek-as-a-lamb Kráner’s shirtsleeve and pushed him down into the chair: “You dare stand up again without my say so, I tell you, you’ll regret it. .” She filled her own glass, drained it in anger, looked round, gave a great sigh and turned to Mrs. Halics (“A den of vice, that’s what this is! But there’ll be tears and wailing and gnashing of teeth yet, just like the prophet says!”) who was watching events with a grim satisfaction. “Where was I?” Mrs. Kráner picked up her broken conversation, waving an admonitory finger at her husband as he carefully reached for a glass. “Oh yes! In other words my husband is a decent man, I can’t complain, and there’s the truth! It’s just the booze, you know, the booze! If it weren’t for that, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, believe you me, butter wouldn’t melt. He can be such a thoroughly good man when he wants to be! And he can work, you know, work as hard as two men! Well, so what if he has a fault or two, dear God! Who doesn’t have faults, Mr. Halics, my dear, tell me that? There’s no such man anywhere. None that walk the earth, anyway. What? He can’t stand people being rude to him? Yes, that’s the one thing he gets really sore about, my husband. That time with the doctor, that happened because, well, you know what the doctor is like, treating people like they’re his dogs! An intelligent man would let it pass, and pull himself together, because it’s only the doctor, after all, and the whole thing doesn’t amount to much, best ignore it, end of story. In any case he’s nowhere near so bad a man as he seems. I should know Mrs. Halics darling, because don’t I know him through and through, his every little foible, after all these years!?” Futaki put out a careful hand as he leaned on his stick and teetered towards the door, his hair tousled, his shirt hanging out at the back, his face white as lime. With great difficulty he removed the wedge and stepped outside, but the shock of fresh air immediately laid him on his back. The rain was beating down as hard as ever, each drop “a sure messenger of doom,” exploding against the moss-covered tiles of the bar roof, against the trunk and branches of the acacia, on the uneven glimmering surface of the metalled road above and, down below the road, on the space by the door where Futaki’s bent, shivering body sprawled in the mud. He lay there for long minutes, as if unconscious in the dark, and when he eventually managed to relax, he immediately fell asleep, so if it hadn’t occurred to the landlord, some half an hour later, to wonder where he’d got to, to find him and shake him into consciousness (“Hey! Have you gone crazy or something?! Get up! Do you want pneumonia?!”) he might have remained there till the morning. Dizzy, he leant against the wall of the bar, rejecting the landlord’s offer (“Come along, lean on me, you’ll get soaked to the bone out here, so stop it. .”) and just stood, stupid and drained under the pitiless power of the rain, seeing but not understanding the unstable world around him until — another half hour later — he was utterly soaked and he suddenly noticed he was sober again. He nipped round the corner of the building to piss by an old bare acacia and, while doing so, looked up at the sky, feeling tiny and quite helpless — and while an endless stream of water gushed from him in powerful masculine fashion he experienced a fresh wave of melancholy. He continued gazing at the sky, examining it, thinking that somewhere — however far away — there must be an end to the great tent extended above them, since “it is ordained that all things must end.” “We are born into this sty of a world,” he thought, his mind still pounding, “like pigs rolling in our own muck, with no idea what all that jostling at the teats amounts to, why we’re engaged in this perpetual hoof-to-hoof combat on the path that leads to the trough, or to our beds at dusk.” He buttoned himself up and moved to one side to be directly under the rain. “Go wash my old bones,” he grumbled. “Give them a good wash, since this ancient piece of shit won’t be around much longer.” He stood there, his eyes closed, his head thrown back because he longed to be free of the obstinate, ever recurring desire to know at last, now that he was near the end the answer to the question: “What is the point of Futaki?” Because it would be best to resign himself now, to resign himself to that last moment when his body dropped into the last ditch, to drop into it with the same enthusiastic thud you expect from a baby saying hello to the world for the first time; and then he thought again of the sty and of the pigs because he felt — though it would have been hard to put the feeling into words, his mouth being so dry — that no one ever suspected that the reassuring self-evident providence that took care of us all on a daily basis would (“At one unavoidable dawn hour”) be simply the light flashing off the butcher’s knife, and that that would be at the time when we least expected it, a time when we wouldn’t even know why we should be facing that incomprehensible and terrifying last goodbye. “And there’s no escape and nothing to be done about it,” he thought as he shook his tangled locks, in ever deeper melancholy, “for who could possibly comprehend the idea that someone who, for whatever reason, would happily carry on living for ever, should be kicked off the face of the planet and spend eternity with worms in some dark, stinking marsh.” Futaki had, in his youth, been “a lover of machines” and retained that love ev