The Rebels Read Free

with the shaking head would indicate her agreement by rapidly batting her eyelids, the magistrate and bandleader would frown and concentrate on the deeper implications of the observation. His childhood was full of such incidents.
    He recalled two specific occasions in the room. One of them underlay every memory involving his father. He would have been four or five years old, sitting on the floor of this room, playing. His father steps in, sits down beside him on the floor, and without further ado begins to sing:
     
    …Au clair de la Lune
    Mon ami Pierrot…
     
    He knows the song. Etelka has taught it to him. His father’s mouth opens and closes, the face is curiously twisted as it laughs, the song emerges from between those enormous teeth with a kind of whimsical childish lisp. He immediately understands that his father wants to put everything right, all that had passed between them from the moment of his birth, the silence, the isolation, the distance, the magic spell under which they had hitherto lived together; this single gesture is to release them from it, that’s what this sitting beside him and singing in such whimsical manner is about. Has he gone mad? he wonders. His father’s voice is losing confidence. He is still singing:
     
    …Non, je ne prête pas ma plume
    À un vieux savetier…
     
    but then he stops and they are left staring into each other’s eyes. There is a statue in the main square, an enormous bronze soldier, pointing his rifle at the tyrant’s chest: it’s as if the soldier had leapt off its plinth, fully armed and uniformed, and was running along on all fours. Vieux savetier…, he repeats, his lips trembling, to console his father for whom he now feels a terrible pity. He starts crying. His father slowly gets to his feet, goes to the table, rummages among his books as if searching for something, notices that the child is watching him even through his tears, shrugs his shoulders, and hurries out of the room. For a long time after this they are like two people joined by a lie that degrades them both: their eyes do not meet.
    Much later, some ten years later. Father is sitting at his table examining a slide under the table lamp when the boy enters. It’s an early afternoon in winter. The boy stops in the half-light but the father extends his hands towards him and invites him to come closer. There is some dry blue matter between the two sheets of glass, something with blotches and lines on it, like the map of the country he sees in his geography book. The father’s bony finger is following the lines of this peculiar map, moving along its branches, its curves, carefully tracing every kink of one particularly sinuous line, and where the line, somewhere near the edge of the slide, breaks, he taps at the glass.
    It is my most beautiful slide, says his father.
    The boy knows that his father’s finger is moving over a section of a brain. The image is full of variety, of dangerous, restless twists and turns. “What a map!” he thinks. His father bends close to the sheet of glass, the light intensely illuminating his face whose expression is of agonized, helpless curiosity, transforming his normally self-disciplined gaze into a mask that is almost grotesque. Involuntarily, he too leans closer. His father’s finger is delicately, circuitously following some point in the image where the crooked line gathers into a knot, then moves off in several directions. Like a cartographer who cannot quite orientate himself on a strange map, like a doctor feeling round a body to discover the secret of a diseased organ, he is helpless and impatient.
    This was a Ruthenian peasant, his father explains, preoccupied. One day he slaughtered his entire family. His parents, his wife, and his two children. It is my most beautiful slide.
    He bends over the dried-up blue substance. His father’s face clears: it is no longer full of painful tense curiosity, it empties, loses expression, the bony hand pushes away the slide