Free The Rebels by Sándor Márai

The movie house is pretty popular and the theater is almost always full when they perform operetta. Amadé Volpay is the comic. One day Ábel will be sitting in a big city and will pronounce the words “world war,” but recall only Tibor and Amadé, and a certain anxiety and curiosity. One’s hometown is not merely the church tower or a square with a fountain though, it is flourishing trade and industry, it is the doorway where some thought first crossed your mind, a bench on which you used to sit pondering something incomprehensible, a moment in the shower where you seemed dizzily to remember fragments of an earlier existence, a neatly polished pebble found in an old drawer that you can no longer think why you stored there, the scripture master’s hat, brown with an unbecoming patch, the cold sweat before a history lesson, strange games whose rules no one understood and you were too embarrassed to explain, a lie the consequences of which gave you nightmares for the rest of your life, an object in someone’s hand, a voice you hear at night through an open window and cannot forget, the way a room is lit, two tassels under a pair of curtains. War is not precisely what we tend to think about it. Ábel will not be telling tales about it to his grandchildren as they sit on his knee, because in him too the war awakens memories of fear and anxiety, but the fear is in respect of Tibor and the anxiety is focused on Amadé. The population numbers sixty thousand. There are tennis courts. The town happens to be asleep right now, the mayor has problems with his heart and lies spread-eagled in his bed, his dentures in the glass of water beside him; in musty rooms omnipotent fathers sleep in nightshirts beside their wives. In the woods above town animals are waking. The actor is saying: Sad to say, you don’t know real vodka. The real pure stuff turns everything you see a blue color.
     
     
     
    T HEY BEGAN STEALING AT THE BEGINNING OF November.
    There was a short period, a few weeks in the gang’s existence, when they could amuse themselves perfectly well without money. They would meet at Ábel’s or Tibor’s place. Sometimes they could spend the whole night at Ábel’s, if they kept their heads down until his aunt had dozed off. At that early stage they didn’t need to pay for entertainment. Cash only became an issue afterwards once their experiments and exploits developed more complex requirements. Béla was the first to commit a theft.
    It was he who had sought explanations and raised objections, who labored to excuse himself. No one had prevailed on him to steal but once he started making excuses, they spontaneously shouted, indeed howled him down. Béla had stolen thirty crowns from his father’s cashbox in order to buy a pair of brown, handmade, double-soled shoes he had coveted in the display of a recently opened shoe shop. He bought the shoes, brought them over to Tibor’s, tried them on, and walked about in the room for half an hour. He didn’t dare go out into the street wearing them because he was terrified at the thought of meeting his father who would notice the shoes on his feet and might get to asking where they were from.
    The way things worked at his father’s big grocery store allowed Béla, once most of the assistants had been drafted and schoolkids had to be engaged to take their place, to remove money inconspicuously from the box, small sums at first, then ever larger ones. Some afternoons, when his father took a nap Béla would slip unnoticed through the gloom of the shop into the glass booth where his father kept cash in the drawer of his desk. The daily intake was substantial enough to allow his theft of ten or twenty crowns to go unremarked.
    Béla worked fast. He bought himself a miscellaneous set of clothes. He was rather fastidious. One relative, the district magistrate, had hanged himself from the window catch in the third year of the war because he feared his wife and children would starve to