War & War Read Online Free PDF

and
then
quit everything; in other words he decided to pack up his things and seek such a “Rome”; for why, he asked himself, why spend his time in an archive some two hundred kilometers southwest of Budapest when he could be sitting at the center of the world, since one way or the other, it would be his last stop on earth? and the idea having come to him it began to crystallize in his constantly aching head and he had even begun to study foreign languages, when, one late afternoon, having stayed behind in the records office, vaguely checking the shelves, as he put it, utterly by chance, he arrived at a shelf he had never before explored, took down from it a box that had never been taken down, not at least since the Second World War, that was for sure, and from this box labeled “Family Papers of no Particular Significance” took out a fascicule headed IV.3 / 1941—42, opened it and, in doing so, his life changed forever, for there he discovered something that decided once and for all what he should do if he still wanted to “carry his plan through” and to make “his last good-byes”; something that finally determined him to put all those years of thinking, proposing and doubting behind him, to let those years go, to let them rot in the past, and not to let them determine his future but to act right now, for the fascicule headed IV.3 / 1941—42 had left him in no doubt what should be done, what to do in order to recover the dignity and meaning whose loss he had been mourning, what important thing there remained for him to do, and above all, where he should seek that which he so much lacked: that peculiar, furiously desired, greatest, very last freedom that earthly life was capable of offering.
    18.
    The only things that interested them, they said the next day while hanging about in front of the Bingo Bar, were the slingshots, the kind used by anglers for laying out bait, not the mind-numbingly idiotic claptrap the geezer spewed continuously, without any prospect of an end, for he was incapable of stopping, so that eventually, after an hour or so of it, it became clear that it was his own repulsive gabble that had turned him into a head-case, though as far as they were concerned, they said, it didn’t add up to anything, so it was completely pointless for him to talk himself into a frazzle, since the geezer meant as much to them as the wind on the footbridge, wind, that, like him, just kept blowing because it was impossible to shut either of them up, not that they gave it a thought, why would they? since he wasn’t worth it, let him talk wind, the only things that mattered being the three slingshots, how they worked and how they would employ them when the six forty-eight arrived, and that was what they’d all been thinking about just before this creep arrived, of the three professional model ground-baiting slingshots they had got as a bargain, for nine thousand Forints, at the Attila József flea market, the three professional
German
ground-baiting slingshots they had tucked under their bomber jackets, and they wondered how these would perform, for people said their projectile power was vastly greater than that of the Hungarian sort, and, of course, far superior to that of hand-held missiles, some people even claiming that this German gear was not only more powerful but almost ensured that your aim was one hundred percent effective, and that it was, according to its reputation, no argument about it, the best on the market, chiefly because of the track-device, attached to the handle below the fork, that steadied your hand in case it accidentally trembled, thereby reducing the uncertainty factor to a minimum by holding the arm firm all the way to the elbow, or so it was said, they declared, or so they say, but not in their wildest dreams would they have imagined what really happened after that, since this piece of goods was brilliant, its capacity absolutely phenomenal, they said, or so said the four of them who