16. Pact
BY THE END of the main recess I already knew there would be trouble because by the time the bell rang, I'd won almost all the money off Lupu and his gang, at first I didn't even want to play the coin-toss game with them, I'd heard they were into cheating, that it was hammered money they threw at the hole so whatever fell in never did bounce out, and that's just how it was, but it didn't do them any good because when it came to calling heads or tails, that white ivory king I got at the ambassador's and had with me in the pocket of my school jacket kept bringing me luck, I won every time we tossed coins, so by the end I was getting so scared that I tried calling out the opposite of what I was thinking, heads instead of tails and vice versa, but I kept winning all the same. Not even letting little Zoli toss instead of me helped any, I just kept winning and winning, and finally Lupu made the sign of the cross and spit on his coins and threw them so high that before they came back down he had time to turn on his heels three whole times and call out the name of Tudor Vládimireszku, protector of the poor, but it did him no good, I won even then, and by the end of the main recess, from the way Lupu and the others were looking at me I didn't want to put away the money at all, but I didn't dare give it back either because that would have been admitting I'd ripped them off, when it wasn't me who'd cheated at all, but them. All that change really weighted down the pocket of my school jacket, I'd won so much, and although I didn't dare count it, there must have been more than two tens there, and as I went up the stairs to the classroom I knew I wouldn't get out of this in one piece, on my way home they'd get me for sure.
So on purpose I took a detour, toward the waterspout and then along the hill and on the footpath behind the apartment blocks. By the old soccer field I went off the path because I didn't want to go near that long ditch that had been left half finished, the ditch where the new sewage line would have gone, no way did I want to meet up with that worker called Pickax because one time when some construction workers had us do some volunteer work they played a joke on me by lying that Pickax was my father and that the only reason I couldn't recognize him right away was because smallpox had done a job on his face, and I almost believed it too because I was really waiting for my father to come home from that labor camp down on the Danube Canal. Since then, Pickax had tried passing along messages to me a few times to go pay him a visit. He'd built himself some sort of house at the end of the empty ditch and that's where he guarded the pipes and waited for the other workers to return and the project to pick up where it left off, but it did him no good leaving those messages for me because I didn't want to see him ever again, even though I couldn't help thinking a lot about his face, which really was all eaten up by smallpox, besides, for a moment I had in fact believed he was my father. So I walked along the bottorn of the hill between the bushes, it was almost twice as far going that way, but at least I didn't meet up with anyone, I was just about home already, all I had to do was get back on the path a bit and then cross the yard behind the apartment block across from ours, and I was already thinking I was home free when, all of a sudden, someone whistled really loud.