Free The Rebels by Sándor Márai Page A

death. His father-in-law’s shop cellars might be stacked with millstone-shaped Swiss cheeses, herring, wheat, potatoes, rice, and sardines but they failed to reassure him and the thought of starving gripped his family’s imagination. Whether at home, at table, or in the shop, Béla, who was able to take his pick of such delicacies even at times of strictest rationing, found little satisfaction in his father’s rich Canaan store. He spent the stolen money in other grocers’ shops, surreptitiously purchasing Baltic herring, Turkish delight, sardines, and anchovies in oil at inflated prices, all goods the traders had bought from his own father.
    Béla was as terrified of his father as simple people are of natural disasters. The mere mention of his name left him pale and trembling. In the gang’s imagination Colonel Prockauer was one of the Fates of Ancient Greece, the Fates who could strike out of the blue and wreak universal carnage, leaving behind a flat plain and the smoke of ruins. Béla’s father was not, like him, an act of fate but part of their common, wholly undramatic lot, an ordinary accident. His bony hand would come into contact with his son’s face and administer light but very powerful blows with a cold methodical regularity, the kind delivered by people with heart problems, anxious—for the family’s sake—not to get themselves overexcited. Once he threw a knife at an apprentice boy, a great big blade he used to cut cheese with, that lay on the counter covered in cheese parings.
    For a long time it was only Béla who stole. They even took care to ensure that it should be Béla alone who spent the stolen money. He had to consume the food he had bought with it in front of the others without any assistance from the gang. Ernõ sat opposite the thief, his penetrating gaze fixed on him, checking that he ate it all up, his cheeks crammed, his eyes bulging.
    He hid the items of clothing he had bought at Tibor’s apartment. He bought other things too: a double-barreled shotgun, a powerful magnifying glass, an enormous papier-mâché globe, a pair of leather leggings with fine straps, a Browning revolver. It was when he bought the bicycle he never dared to ride because he didn’t know how to and because some acquaintance might see him and tell his father that the moment of decision about the hiding place arrived. The purchases were multiplying. Tibor, who was afraid that his father would suddenly turn up, no longer felt up to acting as Béla’s unclaimed luggage office. They had to get rid of the things somehow.
    They began by ordering Béla about. Béla grimaced and obeyed. Within two days he was told to buy an entire fire-works display that would be thrown into the river the next evening. Ernõ was the fount of their best ideas, for example the one where Béla had to steal sixty crowns and send a bouquet of flowers to the prior at the monastery. According to the messenger, the reverend father received the gift with considerable astonishment. He blushed in embarrassment, made a clumsy bow, and stood there with the flowers in his hand, covered in confusion.
    They did more than play cards at Ábel’s place. They told tales of passion, lying their heads off. The stories had to begin with the words: “This afternoon I was passing the theater when I met a sailor, the captain of a ship.” The town lay thousands of miles from any sea. They had to inquire of the sea captain how he came to be in town and what he was doing here. The extraordinary story that developed out of the meeting with the captain had to be built up, detail by detail, out of facts that could be checked or were thought to be at least credible, complete with witnesses who actually lived in town a few streets away and could testify to the truth of the narrator’s account. The core of the story was pure fantasy but the details had to be simple and clear.
    They went around as a foursome. They took up the sidewalk and, at all hours of the day,