, 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 even now when he resembled nothing so much as a small drenched bird, muddied and fouled with his own vomit; and because he knew the precision and order demanded even of the workings of a simple pump he thought that, if a functioning universal principle did exist somewhere (“as it plainly does in machines!”) then (“you can bet your life on it!”) even a world as mad as this must be subject to reason. He stood at a loss in the pouring rain then, without any warning, started furiously accusing himself. “What an idiotic blockhead you are, Futaki! First you roll about like a pig in muck, then you stand here like a lost sheep. . Have you lost what little brain you had? And, as if you didn’t know it was the last thing you should do, you get totally smashed! On an empty stomach!” He shook his head in anger, looked himself up and down, and full of shame, started to wipe his clothes down without much success. With his trousers and shirt still covered in mud he quickly found his stick in the dark and tried to sneak back into the bar unnoticed to get some help from the landlord. “Feeling better now?” the landlord asked winking, ushering him into the storeroom. “There’s a bowl and some soap, don’t worry about it, you can use this to dry yourself with.” He stood there with arms folded and did not move until Futaki had finished washing, though he knew he could have left him alone, but had decided it was better if he stayed, because “you never know what devil gets into people.” “Brush your trousers off as best you can, and wash that shirt,” he said. “You can let it dry off on the stove! Until it’s ready you can put this on!” Futaki thanked him, wrapped the ragged and cobwebbed old coat around him, smoothed back his dripping hair and followed the landlord out of the storeroom. He didn’t go back to rejoin the Schmidts but settled instead next to the stove and spread his shirt over the back of it, asking the landlord, “Got anything to eat?” “Just some milk chocolate and these croissants,” the landlord replied. “Give me two croissants!” said Futaki, but by the time the landlord returned with the tray the heat had overcome him and he was asleep. It was late now and the only people still awake were Mrs. Kráner, the headmaster, Kerekes and Mrs. Halics (who, now that everyone was exhausted, took the liberty of raising her unsuspecting husband’s glass of Riesling to her lips), so Futaki greeted the landlord’s laden tray (“Fresh croissants, help yourself!”) with a quiet mumble of refusal and the croissants were returned untouched. “Fine, drop dead. . Give these corpses half an hour and it’ll be resurrection time again. .,” the landlord muttered in fury, stretching his stiff limbs before mentally making a quick calculation as to “how things stand.” It all looked pretty hopeless because the takings fell far short of what he had originally anticipated and he could only hope that a shot of coffee would bring “the drunken rabble” to their senses. Beyond the financial loss (because, “heigh-ho,” lack of income also amounted to loss) what most annoyed him was that he had been just one step away from getting Mrs. Schmidt into the storeroom when she went out like a light and suddenly fell asleep, which forced him to think of Irimiás again (though he had decided he would not let the thought “bother him because things would take their own course”) conscious that they’d be arriving soon and then it would “all” be over. “Waiting, waiting, nothing but waiting. .,” he fretted, then leapt to his feet because he remembered that he had put the croissants back on the shelf without covering them in cellophane, though “these bastards” would soon be up again and he’d be dashing round with the tray for hours. He was long used to the state of perpetual readiness and had been ever since he got over his first wave of anger, just as he was no longer anxious to find the last owner of the bar, “that blasted Swabian” and tell him “there was nothing in the contract about spiders.” Back then, just two days before opening the bar, having got over his shock, he had tried every possible way of eliminating the creatures but, discovering that it was impossible, he realized there was nothing for it but to talk to the Swabian again in the hope of persuading him to drop the asking price a little. But he had vanished off the face of the earth, which was distinctly not the case with the spiders who continued “joyfully cavorting” about the place, so he was obliged to resign himself for the rest of his life to the fact there was nothing to be done about it, that he could pursue them with rags and cloths and crawl from bed in the middle of the night, but, even so, he could only deal with “the majority of them” at best. Fortunately this never became a major subject of conversation because as long as he stayed open and people shifted from place to place, the spiders couldn’t “go around wrecking the place”: even they weren’t capable in “covering anything that moved in cobwebs. .” The trouble always started after the last customer had gone and he had locked up, washed the dirty glasses, put things away and closed the ledger, at the point when he started to clean up, because then every corner, every table and chair leg, every window, the stove, the rising rank of nooks and shelves and even the line of ashtrays on the counter would be covered in fine webs. And the situation deteriorated from there because having once finished and lain down in the storeroom, quietly cursing, he could hardly sleep because he knew that, within a few hours, he himself would not be spared. Given this, it was no wonder that he shrank, disgusted, from anything that reminded him of cobwebs, and it often happened that when he could no longer bear it he would attack the iron bars over the windows but — luckily — because he went at them with his bare hands he couldn’t really damage them. “And all this is nothing compared. .,” he complained to his wife. Because the scariest thing was he never once saw an actual spider though at that time he’d stay awake all night behind the counter, but it was as if they sensed his presence watching them, and they simply wouldn’t appear. Even after he had resigned himself to the situation he still hoped — just once — to set eyes on one of them. So it became a habit with him, from time to time — without ever stopping what he was otherwise doing — to cast his eyes carefully round the place, just as he was examining the corners now. Nothing. He gave a sigh, wiped the counter down, gathered together all the bottles off the tables then left the bar to relieve himself behind a tree. “Someone’s coming,” he ceremoniously announced on his return. The whole bar was immediately on its feet. “Somebody? What do you mean somebody?” cried Mrs. Kráner, quite pale. “Alone?” “Alone,” the landlord calmly replied. “And Petrina?” Halics spread his hands. “I told you it’s just one man. That’s all I know!” “Well then. . it can’t be him,” Futaki determined. “Quite right, not him,” the rest muttered. . They sat back in their places, lit cigarettes in disappointment or took a sip from their glasses and only a few glanced up when Mrs. Horgos walked into the bar but even those then turned away again partly because, while not particularly old, she looked like an ancient hag and partly because she was not much liked on the estate (“There’s nothing sacred for that woman!” Mrs. Kráner declared). Mrs. Horgos shook the rain off her coat then, without a word, strode over to the counter. “What will you have?” the landlord coldly asked. “Give me a bottle of beer. It’s hell out there,” Mrs. Horgos croaked. She looked round the bar, hard-eyed, not out of curiosity, it seemed, but as if she had arrived just in time to bear witness to a crime. Her gaze finally settled on Halics. She flashed her red toothless gums and remarked to the landlord. “They seem to be having a fine time.” Scorn radiated from her wrinkled crow’s face, the water still dripping from a coat that seemed to have gathered on her back like a hump. She raised the bottle to her mouth and greedily started drinking. The beer ran over her chin and the landlord watched in disgust as