The Rebels Read Online Free PDF Page B

thought. It would be easier in the dark. It was only a few months since he had made the acquaintance of Ernõ’s father, up till then he had known nothing of him. Thinking it over, he didn’t think he was mad. The cobbler seemed to be of no particular age. He felt closer to him than he did any ordinary adult. It was as if the cobbler, like the gang, was living in that transitional state between childhood and adulthood. The cobbler was neither adult nor child. Like them he seemed to hover in a world between good and evil. He felt the weight of this knowledge as intensely as he would the burden of a terrible secret. He was frightened of the cobbler, though sometimes it felt as though he were the only man who could help him. He was like an adult to look at, but Ábel’s sense of him was of someone in disguise, a child wearing a false beard.
    He could never decide whether the cobbler was friend or foe. He employed broad terms: The gentry, he said. The poor. Only sinners may be cleansed. At such times his voice rang like a true preacher’s. His frail, flat tones filled the narrow room.
    “As I said,” he ended without any change of pace, “my son Ernõ is in the coffeehouse with the young gentlemen. Custom now openly permits him to frequent places reserved for adult gentlemen.”
    He bowed and sat back down on his chair and picked up his work as though there was no one else present. Ábel stood beside him and watched him as he leaned, bent-backed, over the sole and pricked a series of tiny holes at the perimeter of the leather strip with his auger. Ábel had come to tell him everything, to talk about Tibor and the actor, to ask him for help in the face of the danger that was threatening them all. Now that he was staring at the cobbler’s wire-wig hair his nerve failed him again. Whatever is said out loud has life. He quietly and timidly took his leave, though the cobbler was no longer paying attention to him. When he reached the steps the cobbler spoke. Astonished, Ábel turned round and saw the cobbler was laughing.
    “We will all be cleansed,” said the cobbler and raised his leather-knife. His face was radiant.
     
     
     
    I T WAS INDEED POSSIBLE THAT THEY WOULD ALL be cleansed. He walked slowly beside the wall, aimlessly, as if he had no particular place to go. The gang would surely be waiting for him by now. The pack of cards was weighing down his pocket. It was a warm evening, uneasily warm. Some time that afternoon there must have been rain that covered the street with a thin, soft sheen of light, but as evening approached a wind got up in the hills and within a few minutes had dried the surfaces. A balmy haze of warmth drifted through the air conveyed to town by freshly swollen fields when the mist of the spring evening rises and dew begins to settle in the pores of the skin.
    He had turned eighteen in April but looked younger than that. Down the school corridors, just before you reached the conference rooms, there was a group of old class photographs on display. He had often studied them, surprised at how different he and his generation looked from those who had graduated ten or twenty years ago. They were enormous mature men, almost without exception. Though most of their faces looked young, there were those among them who seemed fully adult. There were one or two with fine curling mustaches. Next to them Ábel’s friends looked like children in short pants. It was as if with every year that passed the generations had grown softer and more childish. He found the picture of his father’s graduation year. There was Kikinday the judge, Kronauer the colonel in the medical corps, and there was his father too: all proper adults. Kronauer had a sharp mustache, checkered trousers, and a coat after the French fashion. He held a tall hat in his hands. His father was manly, broad-shouldered. He was practically all man, differing from the figure Ábel knew only in that he lacked the latter’s addition of a beard. But