"They come here to drown themselves," says the guard. "They think they're coming for a swim, because they don't know it's to drown."
The edge of the road is overgrown with weeds, the tiny, unidentifiable kind of weed that is on the bare edge of existence. All the way alongside stretch wisps of hair and strands of tape from video- and audiocassettes, fluttering in the breeze. "Anyone who wants to bathe, that is, to drown, has to come along this path," the guard says. He has no cap, no stick, no uniform, just a scrap of cloth tacked onto his chest on which the word 'GUARD' is written in felt-tipped pen. "It fades in the sun every summer. I have to write 'GUARD' again every spring. Last year I still had a green felt-tip, now there's only blue. I preferred the green. More official-looking." He has never felt secure since having to write 'GUARD' with a blue felt-tipped pen. The other day he had been attacked, and he attributed the attack to the blue felt-tip. "Before, no one would ever have dared attack me. Not even my own father." He had been attacked from behind the bushes. One had jumped out in front, the other had sneaked up behind his back. "I'm a guard," the guard had said. "There's no guards here," retorted the one standing in front of him. "It's a free bathing area." And with that he lashed out. The one behind him had jumped on him, the attacker in front hit him. Three times in the solar plexus. Then they walked off. "I yelled after them as well: 'You're going to drown yourselves!', but they only laughed." The slapping flip-flops raised clouds of dust around their ankles. Those clouds of dust are what they disappeared in.
He was left lying on the path, video- and audiocassette tapes and weeds flapping around his head. "I didn't want to get to my feet any more. But then I thought, I've earned the right to see the water spitting up their corpses." That's unless they are hanging on to something under the water, the door handle of a cooker, or a washbasin on the bottom of the pit lake. "People who are drowning often have no idea which way is up or down, so they struggle even deeper down and hang on there." The bottom of the pit lake is littered with the dead bodies of those who had hung on in that way. Crouching all round a cooker and stretched out round a washbasin. "There are even some who are clinging on to one another," the guard says.
"Let's go to the boozer," he says. I've been living by the pit lake for twenty years and never knew there is a boozer. "You bet. Every pit lake has a boozer. A boozer and a guard." And indeed, there was the boozer. "This is Irma. And this one here is my friend. He's been living here by the pit lake for twenty years now." Irma was a feathered dinosaur, a nylon bag spread over live coals, the trunk of an acacia tree in a truck park. "I've also been living here a long time! I like it here. Twenty years is a long time." "There's longer times than that. But let's not say a word about that. My friend wants a drink," says the guard.
Irma wipes the coffee grounds out of the glass, but the grounds stay there. She pours the wine in. Maybe it's not coffee grounds but ants or poppy-seed. "That's my brother's wine. Home-brewed. No muck," says Irma. "Good wine, this. Her brother makes it from grapes from their own garden," says the guard. I've been living by the pit lake for twenty years and never before drunk any of Irma's brother's home-brewed wine. Spent oil, vinegar and goat's piss, with ants thrown in. "Got the knack, your brother," I say. "Indeed, he has," says Irma, "and he also lives by the pit lake. Born here as well. You can't learn that sort of thing."
Irma's brother had tried to leave the pit lake on more than one occasion. "I hate the pit lake," he had told Irma, Irma says. When he was young, thirty or forty years ago, he had wanted to get some schooling. "He said he wanted to go to school. He didn't want to go to rot here by the pit lake. Go to rot—that's what he said. God had singled him out, had plans for him, he said," says Irma. Irma's brother, the wine-maker, loved opera. "He went to the Opera to be able to make some sort of start. He didn't know what he was going to start on but he felt that he had to go to the Opera." And as he was sitting there, in the Opera, it came to him that he wasn't really suited to it… "A sort of sixth sense. 'I sensed that I'm not really suited to it,' he said," says Irma. So Irma's brother had come home, and he has been making wine by the pit lake ever since. "A happy fellow, he is. Winemakers are happy fellows as a rule," says Irma.
"They come here to drown themselves," says the guard. "They think they're coming for a swim, because they don't know it's to drown."
He doesn't have dreams about drowning; he has never choked either in water or anything else, so he doesn't know what choking is like, but even if he did, he would certainly not be in a position to know what death by drowning is like. Quite a lot separates choking from death by drowning. The whole point, in fact: choking is the more serious bit of dying, and that is something that, fortunately, he is not acquainted with. And even though he daily puts his life on the line by being a guard at the pit lake, for some reason he feels that for him death at the pit lake is out of the question. "For me dying in the pit lake is out of the question because I never swim in it. I don't even dip a toe in it. I have watched swimmers a lot, all sorts of swimmers in all sorts of places, and I have come to a firm opinion about swimming, that swimming is bound to lead to drowning. A swimmer, anyone you like, only swims in order to avoid drowning. Swimming was invented purely in order to avoid drowning. Human beings are not made to be in water, which you can see from how unbelievably pathetic people look when they take a dip in water. Hands aren't made for swimming with, feet aren't made for swimming with. A man in water looks like a fish on dry land, or a bird in the soil, and so on—dead from the start. A swimmer is already dead. Children that learn to swim are learning the art of drowning, a very complicated and deferred form of drowning. Some engage in it at a fairly advanced level, competing at who is quicker in getting to the deferred drowning. Some of them win those competitions and are fęted, the losers slink away with long faces."

[...]

Gergely Péterfy
has published three novels and a children's book, as well as radio plays and stories,
many of which have been translated into various languages. His novel Bányató
(Pit Lake) was a critical success in Germany (Baggersee, 2008). It is reviewed by
László Márton on pp. 119–125 of this issue.