Journey by Moonlight Read Online Free PDF

girl idea faded, and my parents came to accept that I was as I was. My mother, I am sure, to this day carefully warns our domestics and new acquaintances when they come to the house, to be on their guard, because I am not a normal sort of person. And yet, for how many years now, there hasn’t been the slightest thing about me to suggest that I am other than perfectly normal.
    “I really couldn’t say what caused this change which my parents noted with such alarm. It’s true that Tamás and Éva demanded absolutely that one should fit in with them, and I heartily, even happily, went along with this. I ceased to be a good student. I revised my opinions and came to despise a whole lot of things which up till then I had liked—soldiers and military glory, my classmates, native Hungarian cooking—everything that would have been described in school terms as ‘cool’ and ‘good fun’. Igave up football, which until then I had followed passionately. Fencing was the only permissible sport, and the three of us trained for it with all the more intensity. I read voraciously to keep up with Tamás, although this wasn’t difficult for me. My interest in religious history dates from this time. Later, I gave it up, like so many other things, when I became more serious.
    “Despite all this, I still felt guilty towards Tamás and Éva. I felt like a fraud. Because what for them was natural freedom was for me a difficult, dogged sort of rebellion. I was just too petty-bourgeois . At home they had brought me up too much that way, as you know. I had to take a deep breath and reach a major decision before dropping my cigarette ash on the floor. Tamás and Éva couldn’t imagine doing anything else. When I summoned up the courage every so often to cut school with Tamás, I’d have stomach cramps for a whole day. My nature was such that I would wake early in the morning and be sleepy at night, I’d be hungriest at midday and dinner-time, I’d prefer to eat from a dish and not begin with the sweet. I like order, and am mortally afraid of policemen. These sides to my nature, my whole order-loving, dutiful bourgeois soul, I had to conceal when I was with them. But they knew. They took exactly the same view, and they were very good about it. They said nothing. If my love of order or thrift somehow betrayed itself, they magnanimously looked the other way.
    “The hardest thing was that I had to take part in their plays. I don’t have the slightest instinct for acting. I am incurably self-conscious , and at first I thought I would die when they gave me their grandfather’s red waistcoat so that I could become Pope Alexander the Sixth in a long-running Borgia serial. In time I did get the hang of it. But I never managed to improvise the rich baroque tapestries they did. On the other hand, I made an excellent sacrificial victim. I was perhaps best at being poisoned and boiled in oil. Often I was just the mob butchered in the atrocities of Ivan the Terrible, and had to rattle my throat and expire twenty-five times in a row, in varying styles. My throat-rattling technique was particularly admired.
    “And this I have to tell you, though it’s difficult for me to talk about it, even after so much wine, but my wife must know everything : I really enjoyed being the sacrificial victim. It was the firstthing I thought of when I woke up, and I looked forward to it the whole day long, yes … ”
    “Why did you enjoy being the victim?” asked Erzsi.
    “Hmmm … well, for erotic reasons, if you follow me. I think … yes. After a while, I would dig up these stories myself, so I could be the victim according to my taste. For example: Éva would be an Apache girl (the cinema had already begun to channel her fantasy —there were films about them at the time) and would lure me into her camp. She would get me drunk, then they would rob me and murder me. Or, the same thing done historically, say, Judith and Holofernes. That story I really adored. Or I