The Fugitive, Chapter 3

In the schoolroom at Charnost, winter settled not simply as a season but as a temperament, a long accretion of silence and condensation through which time passed with the softness of dripping limewater. The walls, which might once have held colour, had long since surrendered to the subtle tyranny of damp, and the sole concession to splendour was a cheap chromolithograph of Franz Joseph, issued for the Golden Jubilee of 1898, its gaudy inks already fading to the colour of weak tea; the pine frame listed slightly to starboard, as though the Emperor himself wished, even here in this provincial classroom, to quit the scene discreetly. Aleksi, seated three rows from the stove, had long since learned to close his eyes during dictation, not in defiance but in pursuit of another air. In these moments he would be, not in Charnost, but perched aon the chalk cliffs above Balchik—though in later years he wondered whether the scene was merely a mnemonic graft from a Sunday postcard of Varna pinned long ago to his aunt’s dresser mirror,—standing beside the very aunt in the evening wind. He had imagined this so often that it had acquired the weight of memory—of the kind that settles over one’s early years and which, though unverifiable, is not therefore untrue. Later in life, he would come to suspect that most of his childhood had been made up of such half-dreams: recollections of places never visited, of faces never quite resolved. Herr Karoly’s voice would then cut in sharply, and Aleksi would open his eyes again to the gritty smell of chalk, the bluish cast of the window frost, and the faint rustle of twenty other children shifting on hard benches. Karoly, at this time of year, was less severe than usual. Perhaps it was the cold in his joints, or the peculiar hush that winter lays over even the most pedantic spirits. His punishments, when they came, were muted, his rebukes more abstract. He had the habit, inherited perhaps from his days in Heidelberg, of quoting whole passages in languages no longer taught in the school—passages which, heard only half-comprehended, drifted through the classroom like incense at a funeral. Outside, the early snow had long since collapsed into greyness. The schoolyard was covered in churned slush and yellowed ice, and from the upper windows one could see the bare trees sagging with the effort of their own exposure. There was little to do but to wait—wait for the sun to return, for the stove to be stoked, for the lessons to end, and for the evening meal which, despite its sameness, offered a kind of punctuation. In those long months Aleksi learned to endure not through courage but through the cultivation of a quiet interiority. It was a method that would remain with him into adulthood, and which he would later recognise in the characters of certain novels—a method of retreat rather than revolt.

Herr Karoly’s past, though seldom spoken of in full, was known in fragments. He was said to be the son of a Hungarian Jew who had made his way eastward from Vienna after inheriting a disputed estate in the margins of the crownlands. The property, an overgrown farm with a crumbling outbuilding and a neglected orchard, had been promised in an uncle’s will but had passed through so many legal intermediaries that, by the time it came into the family’s hands, it had lost all traces of its former usefulness. Karoly’s father, a man of fastidious habits and thin wrists, had left the capital with a railway ticket, a book of Psalms, and a faint belief that the countryside might still contain something unspoiled. He found instead silence, thick mud, and an endless procession of petty debts. There are photographs—sepia and curling at the corners—of the wedding: Karoly’s father in a suit two years out of fashion, his bride with her hair tied back in the manner of the Székely peasantry, staring not at him but just over his left shoulder. The marriage had been a matter of practicality; of affection, there is little evidence. In the only surviving letter from that period, the elder Karoly writes of “a yearning for the ordinary,” and then says no more. His early instruction was entrusted to a pale Thuringian widow whose German was mottled with local dialect and who, lacking sturdier pedagogical tools, intoned the simpler Lieder of Matthias Claudius—verses lifted from well-thumbed almanacs and delivered with a piety ordinarily reserved for the rosary. From this, and from the habit of prolonged observation, Karoly acquired his bearing: formal, aloof, and faintly theatrical. As a boy he had once drawn a portrait of Marcus Aurelius in his copybook and beneath it written, in large uneven capitals, the phrase: I wish to be governed by reason. The teacher at the time had taken it for insolence. When the funds permitted, he was sent to Heidelberg, where he studied engineering without enthusiasm. What impressed him more than the lectures were the melancholy promenades along the Neckar, the smell of damp parchment in the seminar library, and the low voice of a girl from Karlsruhe who quoted Heine without affectation. He did not finish his degree on time.

He returned to Charnost just before the turn of the century. In an optimistic spring before the century’s turn a pair of local entrepreneurs laid some second-hand rails for a horse-drawn trolley, whose worn bell still hung, unusably, from a larch post; by the time Karoly returned, the car had been sold for scrap and the track lay half-buried under meadow grasses, so that its very existence seemed one more provincial rumour. A vacancy had appeared at the Bezirks-Volks-schule, that modest parish institution whose iron stove dated, so townspeople said, from the revolutions of ’48; the appointment promised little more than coal money and a title scarcely worth embroidering on a visiting card, yet Karoly, having nowhere else to turn, accepted it without demur. His habits were simple and largely immutable. He walked each day at the same hour, taking the northern route past the neglected garden plots and the Lutheran churchyard. He wore a greatcoat even in spring. He was observed once at the station reading a French edition of La Tempête while the freight train wheezed past, unmoved by the commotion. He lived alone in rooms above the cooper’s shop. The ceiling plaster was cracked, and the curtains faded to a colourless shade that might once have been ochre. Somewhere about 1909, after a furtive trip to Vienna, he returned with a hand-cranked Berliner disc machine—already a little out of fashion in the capital—and a single record, Bach’s second Brandenburg arranged for salon orchestra; evenings he would lower the steel needle with ceremonial care, and the room, otherwise given over to the scraping of branches against the eaves, filled with that poised Allegro whose fragile surface wore thinner with each revolution. He subscribed to no newspapers. His handwriting, when he marked the children's papers, was narrow and upright, and bore a curious resemblance to that found in judicial records of the earlier century. The children both feared and pitied him. They knew, without knowing how, that he belonged to a time that was already passing.

In the spring, with the coming of the thaw, Karoly's manner turned rigid again. On the first Monday of Lent he struck a girl named Angela on the hands for failing to recite her sums. Aleksi watched from the third bench. The stick—a thin ruler worn smooth at the edge—fell three times. Angela did not cry. Her fingers turned a deep red and remained so until the afternoon. No one spoke to her at recess. There was an understanding, as among animals after a storm, that silence was safer. But by the end of the week, she had become the subject of hushed fascination. Angela, whom no one had looked at twice before, now moved with a kind of solemn grandeur, recounting her story with variations depending on the listener. Andros, the baker’s son, said flatly that she was stupid and deserved it. He threw a snowball at her that missed and then tried to laugh. But no one joined him. Later, when they walked home, Aleksi noticed that Andros still held the snowball in his hand, now half-melted, as though reluctant to be rid of it. As they neared the edge of town, he let it fall onto the road without a sound. No one remembered precisely when Karoly stopped teaching. One morning he was simply absent, and after a few weeks, his name ceased to appear on the timetable. Rumour had it that he had returned to Vienna, or to Lemberg, or to no place at all. The rooms above the cooper’s shop were later let to a travelling dentist. The curtains were replaced. Years later, Aleksi, walking through that same quarter in winter, paused at the sound of a gramophone playing, distantly, what may have been Bach. But it was impossible to be sure. The window was shut, and the snow had begun to fall again.

Even then, there was a kind of muted solemnity to it all, as though they had already begun to mourn what they were only now beginning to experience. Their laughter—nervous, half-smothered by the reeds—was not the laughter of boys entirely unaware of themselves, but rather of boys who had begun to suspect that their own joy might be temporary, or worse, watched. Somewhere on the other side of the trees, in the direction of the gendarmerie road, an ox cart creaked along slowly, and the bell on its harness gave off a mournful chime that made them still for a moment, until Andros called for a race, and the spell was broken. Aleksi remembered it less in images than in textures: the way sunlight filtered through the trembling canopy, turning the water’s surface into a lattice of gold and brass; the strange smell of algae and boyhood perspiration, of moss warmed by the sun; the slight embarrassment, unspoken, of their pale limbs brushing underwater; and how Pavel, his face for once completely unguarded, had turned toward him with an expression of such sincere and fleeting pleasure that Aleksi had the impulse, not quite explainable then or since, to reach out and steady him—though nothing, in that moment, had been unsteady. But all things bend toward dissolution. What remained most vivid, as time passed and the boyhood afternoons gave way to duller seasons, was not the sensation of joy but its violation—its slipping, its retreat. For that same summer, sometime not long after the river days had ended, Herr Karoly had, in a manner which now seemed rehearsed, resumed his quiet pursuit of Pavel.

It began with questions in class directed always to him, increasingly rhetorical in nature, framed as if to flatter but really to test: You must know this, Pavel. Is it not obvious to you? And when he answered correctly, the others were made to suffer, and if incorrectly, it was followed by a silence more terrible than rebuke. Aleksi, who had long grown used to Karoly’s sardonic eye, began to feel a faint revulsion stir in him. He saw now that Karoly had not loved Pavel, not really, but had only seen in him a piece of himself that he wished to preserve in glass—a specimen of melancholy and intellect, uncorrupted by camaraderie. Pavel, for his part, noticed little. Or rather, he noticed and dismissed. It was as if the shadow of Karoly had grown faint in the presence of something more powerful—friendship, yes, but something stranger too, something almost ritualistic in its progression. Their games had become more obscure, their pacts more complex. They began to invent stories about each other’s pasts, not to deceive but to deepen some imagined narrative of their own becoming. Pavel claimed he had once lived in Budapest and had seen the Danube rise past the chains of the suspension bridge. Andros said his uncle was a cavalryman who had duelled with a Russian officer in Bukovina. Aleksi remained silent, half in doubt, half in awe.

At school, their unity gave them a peculiar immunity. Karoly no longer punished Pavel, but ignored him, and this—more than his earlier favour—set Pavel apart. The others, noting his fall from grace, became kind to him in ways they could not have been before. In fall, they would give him the best chalk, or let him cheat from their copybooks, or stand beside him during the morning roll call. It was as if, by being cast out of Karoly’s strange affection, he had returned to them in full. And yet something had changed. Pavel still spoke of boredom, but the tone was no longer bitter. It had become ceremonial, like the repetition of a minor key before a cadence. He had grown taller that year, and when the school photograph was taken under the low wooden awning in October, he stood at the back, arms folded, his mouth drawn in what might have been a smile.

Herr Karoly, in that photograph, sits in the centre, hat on knee, a faint smudge of chalk on his cuff. His face betrays nothing. But when Aleksi found the photo again years later in the attic of the now-demolished schoolhouse—tucked behind a ledger of enrolments and water-damaged sketches of the Austro-Hungarian coat of arms—he saw in Karoly’s eyes something he had never noticed before: not sadness exactly, nor regret, but a kind of exhausted recognition, as if caught in the instant of realising that his creation—his boy—had outgrown him, and that all his careful cruelty, his weary brilliance, had come to nothing. Much later, some further details surfaced. Rumour later placed him variously: boarding with a cousin in Fünfkirchen among the limestone escarpments of southern Transdanubia, or keeping a back room in Pozsony, where the lanes already bore bilingual name-plates that would soon be prised off and repainted.

The boys themselves scattered gradually. Andros enlisted in the army and was killed on manoeuvres in Galicia in the early spring of 1914, though this Aleksi only learned much later. Pavel disappeared from records shortly after that, and despite inquiries, no one could say where he had gone—only that he had left without a farewell, as if the act of vanishing was, for him, the final proof of a life truly his own. Aleksi, older now than Karoly ever was when he taught them, would sometimes wake in early winter with the image of a boy’s back glinting wet beneath a canopy of trees, the air still warm, the water still good, the green schoolpants hung like pennants on a crooked branch, and with a sensation—not of loss—but of something unfinished, still waiting to be explained.