Meanwhile Jancsi got back with the water, and Csabi brought three big pieces of firewood. The corporal pulled a sooty stew pot out from under the trailer, poured around two quarts of water into it from the bucket, and splashed the rest on the ground, and then he turned the bucket upside-down, took a pocketknife from his pocket, pulled out its biggest blade, and jabbed the bottom of the bucket three times in a row. Next he filled the bucket with charcoal, set it right over the mouth of the pickle jar, and poured the blue disinfecting alcohol into the bucket up to the brim, and then little by little the filtered alcohol started dripping into the pickle jar underneath, it was black, like diluted liquid mud. The corporal wiped his hands, looked at us, kicked Mr. Vászile's old tin washtub our way, and said he'd ask us for one more favor, he wanted everyone to find themselves a rag and then to rub down the trailer on the outside a bit, not a whole lot, just enough so its original color would show, and in the meantime he'd set a fire under the grits and then we'd hold ourselves that funeral feast, a proper one at that.
The water in the quarry lake was gray and murky and its smell was pretty strange, I remembered what Zsolt had said about bones being at the bottom, so when I dipped in the washtub and it sucked in water really loud, I yanked it out almost right away, the water swirled around inside like a little eddy, but then I splashed it out on shore, and the second time I dipped the washtub more carefully, filled it up, and took it back up to the others. Csabi pressed a wrinkled necktie in my hand and I wet it, and then we all got down to rubbing the side of the trailer with crumpled rags, and Zsolt whispered over to me that we were lucky it wasn't the inside of the trailer we had to rub down, and I whispered back that I was worried that that would be next, because if it was up to those lousy dogs, we'd be here till night, but Jancsi whispered that then we could at least find the gold, and I said I thought I knew where it was, and I told the others what I found while cleaning, and Csabi said it was now for sure the gold had to be there in the quarry wall under the prehistoric reliefs, we just needed to get there somehow, yes, as long as we had to work our tails off like this, we should at least get something out of it. But Zsolt didn't say anything to that, he just threw his rag into the washtub, sighed, took out the rag, rung it out, and went on rubbing the side of the trailer.