Satantango (10 page)

pálinka
and pushed it in front of the old man. “Given the noise of the thunder it’s really not that surprising . . .” the landlord answered by way of excuse. He was fiercely scrutinizing the newcomer, trying quickly to guess what had brought him here in the rain, why the glass was trembling in his hand, and what he was hiding. But neither he nor Halics asked him anything yet, because there was another great crack in the sky and all the rain seemed to fall at once, in one great sack-full, battering at the roof. The old man tried as best he could to wring the water out of his broadcloth cap, pushed it back into shape, replaced it on his head and, with a careworn look, threw back the
pálinka
. Now, for the first time, since searching for the lost track in dense darkness, a track no one could remember using (the track covered in weeds and rank grass) the excited profiles of his two horses flashed before him as they, inexplicably, kept glancing back at their helpless but determined master, their tails nervously twitching, and he heard again their heavy panting over the squeak and creak of the cart as it rattled over dangerous potholes, and he saw himself standing in the driver’s seat, then holding onto the reins, up to his ankles in mud, leaning against the driving wind in his face, and it was only now he really believed what had happened, that, but for Irimias and Petrina, he’d never have set off, because there was “no power greater than theirs” that could have forced him, because he felt quite certain now that it was true because he saw himself in the shadow of their great power, like a common foot-soldier on the battlefield when he senses rather than hears the order given by his commanding officer and goes about his duties without anyone having told him to do so. And so the images moved silently past his eyes in ever more stilted sequence, as if everything man might hold dear and consider vital to protect existed as part of some independent, indissoluble system, and while one’s memory was still functional enough to furnish it with a degree of certainty and bring into existence its lightly fleeting
now
, as well as validating the living strands of the rules of the system in the open field of events, one was forced to bridge the gap between memory and life not with a sense of freedom but rather bound by the cramped satisfaction simply of being the possessor of the memory; and so at this stage, given the first opportunity of bringing these things to mind, he felt the terror in everything that had happened, though pretty soon he would begin to cling to the memory with an ever greater jealous possessiveness, however often “in the few years still remaining to him” the memory recurred, right down to the last time he conjured these images while leaning out of the tiny north-facing window of the farmhouse at the most miserable time of night, alone and sleepless, waiting for dawn. “Where have you just come from?” the landlord eventually asked. “From home.” Halics looked surprised and took a step nearer. “But that’s at least half a day’s journey!” The visitor silently lit a cigarette. “On foot?” asked the landlord in uncertainty. “Of course not. Horse. Cart. The old track.” He had been warmed through by the drink now and he looked at each face in turn, blinking a little, but he hadn’t yet told them what he wanted to tell them, nor did he know how to begin, because the moment wasn’t quite right, or, to put it more precisely, he was unable to decide about the moment because he didn’t know what it was he was hoping for, and even if it was plain to him that the sense of vacancy and tedium radiated by the very walls was only an appearance, and even if this spot was to be the site of as yet invisible but therefore all the more feverish forces in the coming hours, and even if the wild cries of the party that would soon engulf them were already audible but not yet present, he was, nevertheless, expecting far more than this, a more feverish sense of anticipation than the landlord and Halics were able to offer, and so he felt fate was letting him down badly by presenting him with just these two people: a landlord from whom “a veritable chasm” divided him, because the people he regarded as the “traveling public,” or, more strictly as the generic “Passenger” was, to the landlord merely “a guest . . .”; and Halics, a “flat tire” of a man to whom expressions such as “discipline, firmness of purpose, fighting spirit and reliability” meant nothing now, nor ever had. The landlord was tensely watching the shadows in the nape of the driver’s neck, his breathing slow and careful. Halics meanwhile was convinced — at least until the driver started his story — that “someone must have died.” News quickly spread on the estate and the half hour it took before the landlord returned was plenty enough for Halics, who was in touching distance, secretly to examine what was really behind the labels on those bottles on the shelf, the ones saying RIZLING, a name that was filled with various associations for him, and there was even enough time, in the presence of a sleeping figure and another vaguely nodding off, to make a lightning quick test of his long stated hypothesis that when wine was watered down the color of the mixture — because it was quite a different matter he had in mind! — bore an easily confusable likeness to the wine’s original color. At the same time as he successfully concluded his inspection Mrs. Halics, who was on her way to the bar, thought she saw a star falling from the sky above the mill. She stopped dead in her tracks and put her hand to her heart, but however keenly and stubbornly she scanned the sky, a sky that seemed to be full of ringing bells, she was obliged to admit that it was probably just her eyes sparkling with the unexpected excitement — nevertheless, the uncertainty, the mere possibility of a decisive event as against the oppressive sight of the desolate landscape, pressed on her so heavily that she changed her mind, turned back to the house, took out her ragged Bible from under the pile of the crisply ironed washing, and, with an increasing sense of guilt, set off again down the metalled road by the sign that used to bear the name of the estate, and walked the hundred and seven steps or so to the bar against the driving rain while her mind sought to grasp the developing state of affairs. In order to gain a little time, because in her agitated state the words were merely clanging round in her head, and because she wanted to convey her message (“we are living in apocalyptic times!”) with a blinding, irresistible clarity, she stopped at the bar door and waited until a phrase came to her, only throwing open the door and crossing the threshold once she felt sure it was the right phrase, the right word, at which point she entered, to the astonishment of all within, with the single cry of RESURRECTION! a word whose power was such as to increase the spellbinding effect of her entrance, the term itself being enough to demand attention. Hearing it the farmer’s head snapped back in fear, the driver leapt from his place as if he had been stabbed, and the landlord started back so violently and so suddenly that he hit his head against the wall and was knocked semi-conscious as a result. Soon after that they recognized Mrs. Halics. The landlord couldn’t stop himself shouting at her (“For God’s sake, Mrs. Halics, what in heaven’s name is the matter with you!?”) then attempted to screw the broken bolt back in the door. Halics was overcome with embarrassment and tried to drag his over-excitedly gabbling wife over to the nearest chair (which was no easy matter: “Come along with you, for God’s sake, look at the rain coming in!”) attempting to calm her by simply nodding to everything she said, her speech being a blend of high pathos and whimpering terror that ended only when Mrs. Halics noticed the landlord and the driver giving each other a mocking look and cried out in fury: “It’s nothing to laugh at! There’s nothing in the least bit funny about it!” at which point Halics finally managed to push her into the chair next to his at the corner table. There she retreated into a wounded silence, clutching the Bible to her bosom, looking over the heads of the others into a kind of heavenly haze, her eyes misting over with a blissful sense of certainty derived from above. In her own mind she stood, straight as a post, high above a magnetic field of bent heads and backs, the proud unassailable place she occupied in the inn, a space she was unwilling to vacate, like a vent in the closed bar, a vent through which foul air could escape so that numbing, frozen, poisonous drafts from outside might rush in and take its place. In the tense silence the continual buzzing of the horseflies was the only audible sound, that and the constant rain beating down in the distance, and, uniting the two, the ever more frequent
scritch-scratch
of the bent acacia trees outside, and the strange nightshift work of the bugs in the table legs and in various parts of the counter whose irregular pulse measured out the small parcels of time, apportioning the narrow space into which a word, a sentence or a movement might perfectly fit. The entire end-of-October night was beating with a single pulse, its own strange rhythm sounding through trees and rain and mud in a manner beyond words or vision; a vision present in the low light, in the slow passage of darkness, in the blurred shadows, in the working of tired muscles; in the silence, in its human subjects, in the undulating surface of the metalled road; in the hair moving to a different beat than do the dissolving fibers of the body; growth and decay on their divergent paths; all these thousands of echoing rhythms, this confusing clatter of night noises, all parts of an apparently common stream, that is the attempt to forget despair; though behind things other things appear as if by mischief, and once beyond the power of the eye they no longer hang together. So with the door left open as if for ever, with the lock that will never open. There is a chasm, a crevice. The landlord, having discovered it was a waste of energy trying to find a firm patch in the rotten door, threw the bolt aside and made do with a wedge then sat back on his stool with a curse (“The gap’s still a gap,” he eventually muttered, resigned to the fact), so that his body at least might get a rest and so be able to resist the spiraling anxiety that — as he well knew — would soon overtake him. Because it was all in vain: he no sooner felt a sudden and violent desire to be revenged on Mrs. Halics than the desire was overtaken by a precipitous descent into despondency. He took a look around the tables, estimated how much wine and
pálinka
there was left, then got up and pulled the storeroom door closed behind him. Now that no one could see him, he gave his rage free rein, shaking his fist and making terrifying faces, keenly aware of the smell of rust (“the smell of love . . .” as he often had occasion to term it when the Horgos girls had pitched their headquarters there) and running his eye straight down the line of untouched goods as he always did when wanting to think over some pressing problem, toward the window that was protected from potential roadside thieves by two iron bars of a finger’s thickness each, as well as a dense weave of cobwebs, then back along the sacks of flour, past the high piles of foodstuff right down to the little desk where he kept his business books, his notes, his tobacco and various personal belongings, and finally back to the small window where — having already made a discourteous remark regarding the Creator who was trying to ruin his life with these “filthy spiders,” without feeling any particularly keen emotion either way — he turned to his right and, stepping over a pile of spilt grain, soon reached the iron door again. It was all nonsense: he didn’t believe in any kind of resurrection and was happy to leave such humbug to Mrs. Halics who was well acquainted with humbug of all sorts, though one might of course feel a certain uneasiness if it suddenly turned out that someone thought dead should turn out to be alive. He’d had no reason at that time to doubt what the Horgos kid had firmly stated, he even drew him aside to “interrogate him” more intensely about the details; and, though some of the smaller details made him question the pillars on which the story was built because they were “not as solid as they might be” he never once assumed the story itself to be false. Because, he asked himself, what reason would the Horgos kid have for telling such a whopping lie? He himself, of course, was firmly of the opinion that the kid was as rotten as could be but no one could tell him the boy was capable of making up such a story without any outside help, or indeed encouragement. But, at the same time, he was pretty certain that (while someone might indeed have seen the dead in town), death was death, and that’s it. He wasn’t in the least surprised: it’s just what you’d expect of Irimiás. As far as he was concerned nothing was too strange to be believed about that lousy vagrant, because it was perfectly clear that he and his companion were a pair of filthy scoundrels. He resolved that whenever and however they arrived he would stand quite firm: the wine had to be paid for. In the long run it wasn’t his problem — they might be ghosts for all he knew — but anyone that wants to drink here has to pay up. Why should he be the loser? He hadn’t “worked his fingers to the bone” all his life; he hadn’t set up this business by sheer hard slog so that “a bunch of idle tramps” should swig his wine for free. People didn’t sell on credit, and grand gestures — that kind of thing — were not his style. In any case he did not think it impossible that Irimiás really
had
been hit by a car. Why? Hadn’t anyone but him ever heard of a case of apparent death? So someone had succeeded in dragging people back into this miserable life, so what!? In his opinion, this was not beyond the ability of modern medicine, though it was an act of considerable carelessness, if so. One way or the other, he wasn’t interested; he was not the kind of man to run scared of a figure suspected to be dead. He sat down at his desk and, having blown the dust off his account book, leafed through it, pulled out a piece of paper and a blunt much-chewed pencil stub and, feverishly adding up the figures on the last page, scribbled some meaningless numbers while incoherently mumbling to himself:

10 x 16 b. @ 4 x 4

9 x 16 s. @ 4 x 4

8 x 16 w. @ 4 x 4