Ádám Bodor
Give or Take a Day
(Short story)
Seen from the main road, the prison building lept up out of the smoothness of the meadow like some sort of natural wonder, as a solid, white rock. A blue and white road sign showed that this was a cul-de-sac; from here a short link road led to the main gate, opposite which stood the red brick building of the barracks, and under the dusty horse chestnuts, a wooden hut fitted out as a general store. Somewhere in the distance, above the acacias, the image of a church tower quivered in the air.
A motor vehicle stopped in front of the hut. Two soldiers jumped down and hand-ed demijohns to each other, which they arranged on both sides of the hut. An officer got out of the driver's cab and walked towards the main gate. He passed the benches set against the wall on which the guards usually sat at around the time for their relief. Now a scruffy-looking man with short hair was sitting on one of the benches. It was at this time, around noon, that the prisoners were generally released.
"It looks like Sturm," said the officer to the sergeant standing in the gate.
The sergeant looked in the register.
"That's who it is," he said. "Elemér Sturm left us at noon today."
Sturm stuck a cigarette between his lips, then put his hand in his pocket and took out a round tin. It was a bootpolish tin with a piece of cloth in it burnt black. He held the lower half of the tin with the burnt rag in it between his knees, with the lid at right angles above it. From his other pocket he fished out a white china button; a string was threaded through the holes, so that by pulling it rhythmically you could get it to spin, like some sort of child's toy. He let the rapidly spinning button touch the lid of the tin, and from the sparks flying off and the breath directed at it the burnt rag started to shrivel. So much so that Sturm could light his cigarette with it.
While he was smoking Sturm watched the soldiers lining up the demijohns. Later he too went over to the hut, pressing his nose against the glass, gazing in.
When the soldiers had finished, an armed corporal and a rookie came over from the red barracks and asked the driver for a lift to the main road. The link road was about three hundred metres. Behind the cul-de-sac sign on the left side of the road stood a small guard-room; in its shade two other soldiers were resting in the grass while waiting for their relief. Two prisoners were whitewashing the guard-room; they were guarding those.
The prisoners were covered in paint from head to foot, they looked like real painters. They behaved like that too, as if they were doing a favour, and the corporal himself only glanced towards the door when a car went past slower than usual on the main road.
The afternoon bus stopped there just to see whether there was a passenger for town. Just about no-one ever got off. Soon after the bus had started again with a brief toot, nearer to where the soldier and the corporal were sitting in the grass, at the edge of the corn-patch, the short-haired shabby man appeared with a parcel wrapped in a newspaper under his arm, and since this was the nearest bit of shade, he settled beside the guards.
They stared at his faded greenish tunic which he wore with the same coloured trousers and tatty boots. The name "Sturm" was stitched in white at the bottom of his tunic and after it a stock number. Although badges of rank had long been absent, you could tell by the material that it had once been an officer's uniform. Sturm had a grey, stubborn face like that of a post-mortem assistant.
The corporal and the soldier were smoking, and when he got a whiff Sturm too got out a cigarette, then his shoepolish tin, and, keeping the lid at right angles above the rag, he held the lower part between his knees.
"So you bungled it," said the corporal to the soldier, while both of them kept an eye on Sturm.
"I didn't want to," said the rookie.
"There's no such thing as not wanting to, when it comes to a woman. If you don't want it, you're sick. Or was she perhaps a relative of yours?"
"Course not."
"So what happened then?"
"She went off with a maths teacher."
"To a maths lesson."
As they chatted they watched the way Sturm lit his cigarette. When it was alight, Sturm looked towards them, and for a while they went on looking at each other.
"What sort of uniform is that?" the corporal asked Sturm.
"A uniform," Sturm said.
"But the buttons, I can tell, aren't the original ones."
"No, they aren't. The buttons were cut off in time," said Sturm. As he spoke he stared ahead into the grass. Around his neck the cigarette smoke was floating like silver strands of hair.
"You should go to a good tailor," said the corporal.
"You've got a bit fat for it," said the soldier.
"Definitely," said the corporal.
Sturm took a good look at himself, but not like one about to rush off to a tailor. He stared at himself blankly.
The corporal looked at Sturm from the side too.
"Not really fashionable," he said. "You look like an ice-cream man in it. Or the sort of bloke who hangs around schools, making children run."
Sturm stretched his arms with a bored movement. The sleeves of his tunic didn't reach his wrists.
"I don't think it can be mine," he said. "Or could my arms have grown?"
"It's possible, if that's what the food was like. Probably very likely."
"My back could have got broader?"
"You may have changed shape a bit," said the corporal.
"Whenever did you move here?"
"In forty-six," said Sturm, and spat his cigarette on the ground in front of him.
"If your tailor was an old man," said the corporal, "he must have died by now. How old are you?"
"I'm fifty-four," said Sturm. "You people worked it out today in the office."
"Didn't you know yourself, Mr Sturm?," the rookie asked.
Sturm looked at him, but didn't say a thing. He pulled at the sleeves of his tunic.
"Yes, he did," said the corporal to the soldier. "Of course he did."
"The human body really is strange," Sturm said to himself in a whisper. "My arms must have grown."
"You see?"
"It grows and grows," said the soldier.
"What?" asked the corporal.
"The human body," said the soldier.
Sturm eventually undid his buttons. The corporal gave the private a shove meaning he'd better keep quiet, then he turned towards Sturm.
"The afternoon bus has gone. We'll wave a car down for you to take you to the station."
"We'll see," said Sturm, and looked over to the main entrance where several prisoners were setting out to get drinking water with a huge barrel fitted into a cart. Two of them were pulling it, two pushing it.
Two corporals accompanied them.
"Is that you, Sturm?" asked one of them.
"Greetings!" said Sturm.
"Time flies."
They crossed the main road with the water barrel and into the meadow in the direction of the wells. The corporal got up and went into the guard-room to see how work was progressing. The rookie offered Sturm a cigarette, he got out his bootpolish tin. The soldier leant close and watched as the burnt rag started to shrivel from the tiny spark.
"I'll give you a box of matches for it."
"No way," replied Sturm, shaking his head. "I need it."
"A clever tool."
"Clever, yes," said Sturm, and put it back in his pocket. "Can you play merils?" he asked.
"Yes, I can," said the rookie.
"Let's play a game then." Sturm took out a marked handkerchief from his pocket and nine black pebbles. "Haven't you got any stones?" he asked the soldier.
"Not me," said the private.
"Then break off the heads of nine matches." They set out the stones and the match-heads on the handkerchief.
"Listen," said Sturm during the game. "You get a piece of rag and let it burn well and thoroughly with a good flame. Then you put your cap over it and stifle it. After that you pick it up very carefully, so that it doesn't fall apart, and put it in a bootpolish tin. Or any other tin. Then you get hold of a china button, the kind village children wear two of in their collars."
"Hey!" shouted the corporal. "Something is coming." Sturm sat bent over the handkerchief.
"Look at that position," he said to the rookie. "Do you agree that it's hopeless?"
The soldier looked in the direction of the corporal who was now standing on the main road and waving down an approaching truck.
"Come on, Sturm!" shouted the corporal. "Come on, you'll get a lift into town."
Sturm stood up. He looked at the truck for a while then at the corporal, and sat down again.
"Let's go on," he said to the rookie. "Let it go!" he shouted to the corporal. "I'm not going yet."
When the truck had gone the corporal returned.
"It'll soon be evening," he said. "He would have taken you to the station."
"No hurry," Sturm said.
The corporal sat down beside them in the grass and watched them playing until the wind suddenly lifted one side of the handkerchief with the match-heads. Sturm looked around.
"The wind's blowing," he said.
"That it is," said the corporal.
"We could go in there," said Sturm, pointing to the guard-room.
"I can't allow that," said the corporal gently.
Sturm got up, walked over to the main road, stopped at the edge, and leant out over it as if it were a river, then he walked back.
"Can't you play by heart?" he asked the soldier.
"I've never tried."
"You have to imagine the handkerchief and the eighteen stones. Your stones and mine. There's no way you can cheat."
"I don't think I could do that," said the soldier.
"Maybe not," said Sturm.
The sun was not quite so hot now. They moved over to the far side of the link road, opposite the guard-room where the painters were working.
"It'll be eight before they finish," said the corporal.
"They've got to get it done by nightfall."
"What's happening tomorrow?" asked the rookie.
"Children's Day," said the corporal.
The others were approaching with the water-barrel from the meadow behind the main road. One of the corporals stopped to talk to the other corporal. Sturm, on he other hand, set off beside the cart as if they had merely swapped places; later he too began to push it.
"Where's Sturm off to?" asked the rookie when they had gone some distance.
The corporal looked over to where Sturm had put down his parcel when he arrived.
"He'll be back. It's not him we're guarding."
"He can do what he likes now, right?" said the soldier. "He can loaf around to his heart's content."
"Yeah, he can," said the corporal. "He hasn't been able to loaf around for quite some time. He could have got away with 10 years. But he broke the rules when he was in charge of executions. He got them to strip and ordered them to shiver and moan. Only then did he allow them to be shot. He got 25 years for that. A bit of imagination can get you into trouble."
"Perhaps he could become an ice-cream man," said the soldier.
"Well, you know where he could go," said the corporal.
In the mean time Sturm had reached the gate with the water-barrel, and he walked in with the others. Once the gate had shut behind them, they were counted.
"What the hell?" said the sergeant at the gate. "That beats me."
And he recounted them. He could see there was one too many.
By that time Sturm had dropped back unobtrusively towards the gate-room. The corporal who had been with the prisoners pushing the barrel suddenly woke up and started to explain that it was Sturm, and that Sturm had been released that morning. The sergeant looked in the register and he too saw that Sturm had been released that morning.
"What the hell are you up to, Sturm?" shouted the sergeant. "Where the devil did you want to go at this time of the evening?"
Sturm was at a loss: he looked around in an obstinate sort of way and shrugged his shoulders.
"Nowhere," he said.
"I'd better think it was by accident," shouted the sergeant. "I'd certainly better think it was completely by accident that you strayed in here. Get out at the double or you'll get us into terrible trouble."
Sturm sat down on a bench outside the gate. He stuck a cigarette between his lips, then took out his bootpolish tin. When he had smoked the cigarette he walked over to the all-purpose hut and hung around there for a while.
The corporal and the rookie were lying in the grass at the side road. They were smoking when Sturm came back carrying a demijohn.
"What's that?" asked the corporal.
"I bought it," said Sturm, and stood it beside his package. Then he left just the demijohn there. "Aren't you hungry?" he asked, and unwrapped the newspaper. "I've got some bacon and onions and a bit of jam. It's what I was given for the journey."
"Are you hungry?" the corporal asked the rookie.
"I could eat something," said the soldier. "I could eat a bit of fried bacon."
"Let's eat then," said the corporal. He stood up, withdrew behind the guard-room, and brought back a few broken slats of wood and a shovelful of coal.
They lit a fire and waited for it to burn to embers. Sturm sliced up the bacon and carved some crooked spits from the branches of an apple tree at the side of the road. By the time the bacon had fried, the sun had gone down. The white prison building was waiting like a solid rock to blend into the grey of the sky.
"Aren't you going to eat something?" asked the corporal when he saw that Sturm hadn't touched the food.
"No," said Sturm, "I don't want to eat."
"Did you have lunch?"
"No," said Sturm. "I'm not hungry today."
When the corporal and the rookie had eaten their share, Sturm pointed to his own.
"Split it between you," he said. "Do you like jam?"
"I'd like a little," said the soldier.
"You'll eat at the station," said the corporal. "A proper supper, right?"
"Maybe," said Sturm.
"I'll wave a car down soon and you can get a lift," said the corporal. "But as you can see, there's not much traffic."
"I'm in no hurry," said Sturm.
Around eight o'clock the painters were finished. They got a cigarette each from the corporal. When they had finished smoking the corporal stood them one behind the other. They didn't know Sturm, but they had heard the corporal and the soldier talking, and they looked with revulsion at the man in his tunic who had made people shiver and moan.
"You'd better hurry," the corporal said to Sturm as he left.
"I'll sit around for a bit longer," said Sturm.
"He's waiting for some sort of female in the corn patch," said the soldier, then they set out with the two painters down the link road in the direction of the gate.
"He must have been a rotten sod," said one of the painters.
"And types like him are running free nowadays," said the other.
"Oh, come off it," said the corporal. "Are you always so squeamish? Such a worry-guts?"
"How long were you sent here to swan around for?" asked the rookie.
"Two months," said the painter.
"And you get paid too."
They were approaching the gate by then.
"Would you let types like that out of here?" the soldier asked the corporal quietly.
"I'll be frank with you," said the corporal. "It's not my business luckily. They were all just like lambs here. Sturm as well. But it could be that when he's outside he'll go wild again. Luckily it's not our business."
Not long after they were out of sight Sturm got up too. He looked at the road for a while, at the cars driving past, then he picked up the demijohn and walked off with it into the corn patch. When he felt he was about in the middle he put it down. He uprooted a few corn stalks, and with his feet scraped a nest for himself in the soft earth, big enough for him to sit in. He put the demijohn beside him, took out the cork, lifted it above his head and held it there upside down until all the petrol in it had poured over him. His hands stayed dry. He put a hand in his pocket and took out the bootpolish tin. He threw away the lower part with the burnt rag and held the lid between his knees. Then he took out the china button and started to tug at the string. When the button was spinning nicely he let it touch the lid.
A yellow light flashed against the wall of the corridor in the barracks, and two soldiers called the rookie out of the dormitory, saying something was burning in the corn patch. They watched the soon dying flames which were gradually hidden by the rows of stalks, and for a time the reflection of the fire only showed in the smoke circling above it.
"He probably didn't get a car," said the soldier. "And he's sleeping in the corn."
"Who?" asked another soldier.
"An old bloke," said the rookie.
"He's probably cold."
"The evenings are getting chilly."
"He might just have wanted some light."
"He may be frightened in the dark."
"He may feel as if he's on some sort of trip," said the rookie. "He was some kind of satyr before."
"What kind of satyr?"
"I meant to say, sadist or something. He did a tough twenty-five years."
"Twenty-five, that's quite a lot. That must be quite a lot of days."
"At least a thousand."
"Around ten thousand rather."
"If you count the leap years, it's even more."
"Who bothers about the leap years?"
"Including leap years it's nine thousand and thirty-one," said the rookie. "Give or take a day," he added. ß
Translated by Elizabeth Szász
Ádám Bodor
is a Transylvanian writer, author of eight volumes of fiction, who now lives in Hungary. A collection of short stories, The Euphrates at Babylon, was published in Britain by Polygon in 1991.
