Judit looked at Terey with something like pity. She started to explain something but shrugged and sighed, “He will wait until the next incarnation. You are a good fellow, Istvan.” It was as if she had said, You are naive, even a fool.
“I wanted to apprise you that your other protégé,” Ferenc began maliciously, “well, you know, the runaway from Ceylon, the writer…”
“I did not support him at all.”
“But he came to the embassy and you gave him gifts. You loaned him money.”
“He printed two articles for us. You yourself gave him entrée, comrade secretary.”
“He lifted those articles from our brochures. He can do that much. I am not reproaching you, Istvan, but it would be better if you knew whom you were taking under your wing. In a few days he is going to the Bundesrepublik. He will write flattering reportage from there.”
“And you said he couldn’t write!”
“They will write for him. They will write; it will be enough for him to sign the articles.” Ferenc turned the knife. “You are a poet. You look for true art, and you despise the ordinary bullhorn because it is a bullhorn for hire. That is how Jay Motal should be treated. The Germans bought him. They beat us to the punch.”
“They won’t get much for their money.”
“That is our only comfort,” Judit said, and, wishing to end their quarreling, added, “Has either of you been to the cinema?” Seeing their surprise, she explained, “The film was not important. It was the newsreel. Yesterday at the Splendid Palace I saw barricades on the streets of Budapest, and dead insurgents. I tell you, for those few minutes of footage, you have to go. It wrings the heart — the scarred center of the city. Burned-out houses standing amid the rubble.”
“Shall we go, Istvan?” Ferenc suggested, scribbling on the windowpane with a finger.
“What are you drawing there? The gallows?”
“No. Your initial,” Ferenc rejoined. “A capital T, though it may be similar…”
“Go at eight,” Judit begged them. “Must you be eternally sparring?”
“I don’t know if I will have time,” Istvan said evasively. He wanted to take Margit.
“What work do you have that is so urgent?” Ferenc’s interest was aroused. “You are avoiding us, isn’t he, Judit?”
“Yes. He was different before,” she said with a baffled air. “You have changed, Istvan.”
“That’s rubbish!”
“You used to drop in for coffee. We always had something to chat about,” she chided him.
“The counselor no longer trusts us.” Ferenc tightened the screw. “Evidently he has found other confidants.”
“You know yourself that that’s not true.” Istvan turned away and, wishing to break off the conversation, went to his office.
He wrote a letter regarding Ram Kanval, warmly praising his art. When the clattering of the typewriter keys had stopped, he heard voices from the corridor: they were still talking. He sensed that they were speaking of him. His left ear felt hot. His old aunt had always warned, “Left ear burns you, they speak ill of you; right ear — good news.”
An insistent fear reasserted itself: what does Bajcsy know about Margit? Should he believe what Chandra had said? How could he profit by the warning? He could not sit still. He reached for the telephone and when the operator answered, he asked to be connected to the prosecuting magistrate. For some time the Hindu woman searched for the official who was investigating the accident involving the motorcyclist Krishan. At last he had the right man, a man who listened patiently to him and asked for his name letter by letter. When he had finished, the official informed him, to his great surprise, that his intervention was unnecessary, though of course information from a counselor at the embassy would have been highly valued; the woman who had been arrested had been set free the previous day. It had been irrefutably determined that she had nothing to gain by ridding herself of her husband, and she had accused herself as a result of the shock she had experienced.
Feeling relieved and a little disappointed, he hung up. “I acted too slowly,” he half-whispered.
Someone knocked at the door. Before he said distractedly, “Come in,” the balding caretaker had slipped into the room.
“I am here to clear away the papers.” He ran a hand over the desk, on which rose piles of bulletins and newspapers. “Indeed, counselor, you have no room to move. May I straighten up? What is put aside I will take to the archive, what is not needed will go to the stove, and you will have breathing space.”
“Very well. Take the stacks from the floor. From the desk as well. What I need I have cut out and put in my briefcases.”
“I know that an official needs papers, but you were a military man before that, counselor. Why rustle like a mouse in old newspapers? I will take them away. New ones will come.” He waved his hands as if he were about to fly up over the choked shelves. “I also came here on a temporary basis…”
He glanced at the nail on which the portrait of Rakosi had hung and winked knowingly at Terey. “I thought I would be in India for only two years and then back in our country, and in the meantime I have outlasted these great ones,” he said. “They fell off their high pedestals, and I keep my seat. I mind my own business and I have nothing to be ashamed of.”
He smiled shrewdly. He looked at his hands as if to be certain they were not dirty. “I gather up the trash…”
“Haven’t you been drinking a little?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “I can tell you, sir…everyone here has a mouth full of high-sounding words. They fight for socialism, but in the soft way, with their comforts, for good money. And I, with this very hand”—with his left hand he struck the open palm of his right—“I killed four fascists. That much I know for sure.”
“When?”
“When I went from Sallaumines to the Reds, to Spain. I did it in a mine with Poles, Italians, Algerians — the rag, tag, and bobtail. We had nothing to sell but ourselves.”
“And what happened there?”
“By the Ebro? Those I killed? One was a Spaniard, an aristocrat, a very handsome fellow; when I blindfolded him, he spat at me. I understand: an enemy is an enemy. And three Moors…they were skilled at fighting with knives.”
“What has brought on this deluge of memories?”
“I cannot speak English very well. I do not read the newspapers. Sometimes the cryptographer will tell me how things are, but he looks around three times before he speaks. Maléter has been shot. I knew him.”
“Would you have preferred that he shoot himself in the head?”
The caretaker looked nonplussed.
“Do you think there was no way out, sir?”
“My friend, I don’t know. I can only speculate. It’s wearing me out as well. Do you think it’s easy for me?” Terey sprang to his feet. “What if that death saved thousands of other lives? Think of it as a loss sustained in battle.”
The man tilted his head and scowled at Terey. His lips twisted in a bitter grimace. “No, counselor, I cannot. That would be putting too good a face on it. You people, as soon as something happens, will always get around a fellow with your talk of how there must be different ways of making sense of it. I know my own.”
He looked at his own hands again with a sternly appraising glance, as a father looks at his sons when they return from work in the field.
“Though I have killed, I have clean hands.” He straightened his back. “I go around the embassy and I look at the comrades. They feel that there are changes and each one thinks of how to find a place for himself.”
“That’s human, after all.”
“And I don’t worry that they will let me go because a better set of people come. I can always manage. Only I would like to be certain to the end that what I do not only puts food on my plate, but serves the nation. I would not measure out my blood drop by drop; what is needed is needed. What more can I give, except for my life?”