War & War Read Free

at the center of which, naturally, there would be a miniscule blind spot: as with Korin … the footbridge … the seven kids.
    9.
    A total dickhead, they told a local acquaintance the next day, a total dickhead in a league of his own, a twat they really should have got rid of because you never knew when he’d inform on you, ‘cause he’d had a good look at everybody’s face, they added to each other, and could have made a mental note of their clothes, their shoes and everything else they were wearing that late afternoon, so, yeah, that’s right, they admitted the next day, they should have got rid of him, only it didn’t occur to any of them at the time to do so, everyone being so relaxed and all, so laid back, like a bunch of dopes on the footbridge while ordinary people carried on leading ordinary lives beneath them as they gazed at the darkening neighborhood above the converging rails and waited for the signals for the six forty-eight in the distance so that they might rush down to the embankment, taking up their positions behind the bushes in preparation for the usual ritual, but, as they remarked, none of them had imagined that the ritual might have ended in some other fashion, with a different outcome, that it might not be completed entirely successfully, triumphantly, right on target, in other words with a death, in which case of course even a pathetic idiot like him would be an obvious danger because he might inform on them, they said, might get into a funk and, quite unexpectedly, inform on them to the cops, and the reason it worked out differently, as it did in fact, leaving them to think the thoughts they had just thought, was that they hadn’t been concentrating, and can’t have been, otherwise they’d have realized that this was precisely the kind of man who presented no danger because, later, he couldn’t even remember what, if anything, had happened at about six forty-eight, as he had fallen ever deeper under the spell of his own fear, the fear that drove his narrative onward, a narrative that, there was no denying, apart from a certain rhythm, lacked all sense of shape or indeed anything that might have drawn attention to his own person, except perhaps its copiousness, which resulted in him trying to tell them everything at once, in the way he himself experienced what had happened to him, in a kind of simultaneity that he first noticed added up to a coherent whole that certain Wednesday morning some thirty or forty hours before, two hundred and twenty kilometers from here in a ticket booth, at the point when he arrived at the front of the queue and was about to ask the time of the next train for Budapest and the cost of the ticket, when, standing at the counter, he suddenly felt that
he should not ask that question here,
at the same moment recognizing in the reflection in the glass over one of the posters above the counter, two employees of the District Psychiatric Unit, disguised as a pair of ordinary numbskulls, really, two of them, and behind him, at the entrance, a so-called nurse whose aggressive presence made his skin prickle and break into a sweat.
    10.
    The men from the District Psychiatric Unit, said Korin, never explained to him what he had wanted to know, which was the reason he had attended the unit to start with, and that was the matter of how the whole system that held the skull in place, from the first cervical vertebra through to the ligaments (the Rectus capitis), actually functioned, but they never explained it, because they couldn’t, chiefly because they themselves had not an inkling, their minds being shrouded in a wholly impenetrable darkness that resulted in them first staring at him in astonishment, as if to indicate that the question itself, the mere asking of it, was so ludicrous that it provided direct and incontrovertible proof of his, Korin’s, madness, then giving each other significant glances and little nods whose portent was (was it not?) perfectly clear, that they