The White King (19 page)

M
OTHER TALKED
everything over with me most of the time, often she told me why things were the way they were, and when she did that, she answered my questions too, or when she didn't, then I knew she thought it best that we didn't talk about it, because what I didn't know, I couldn't tell anyone else even by accident, and I had to admit she was right about that because I knew there really were things it was dangerous to even mention, for example, exactly what happened during the civil war or how much so-and-so could get meat or coffee for, or how much it took to pay off so-and-so, or why the Party General Secretary, who was also commander of the armed forces, was a treasonous brute, or which of the people we knew had been taken away, or who had their homes searched and why. When I asked her about things like that, Mother either said only that this was serious business, let's not talk about it, or else that I should ask Father instead when he finally got home. But lots of times she didn't even have to say this much, no, from the way she looked at me I could tell it would be best if I didn't ask questions to begin with.

That's just how it was when Mother came home one Thursday and asked me if I had any money saved up, and how much. I could tell right away from her voice that she wasn't kidding around, and so I told her the truth, that I had two tens, but I didn't tell her where I got them from because I knew she wouldn't have been happy to find out that I got one of them from my grandfather and that I won the other at cards, because I wasn't supposed to play cards or accept money from my grandfather, but even Mother must have figured it was best not to go asking where I had such a load of money from because she didn't say a thing, no, she just went into the living room and straight to Father's picture, which she took off the wall, there was an envelope stuck to the back of the picture with electric tape, Mother opened it and took out a bunch of bills and licked her index finger and counted the money right away, and then I heard her saying softly, "Five hundred twenty-five plus twenty is five hundred forty-five, so we still have to scrounge up one thousand four hundred fifty-five to make two thousand," and she told me to go look around my room to see what I could do without, and meanwhile she'd pick out some of her clothes and scrape together everything she thought we might get a good price for and didn't really need, and I shouldn't make any plans for Sunday morning, we were going to the flea market because we needed the money by Monday.

I just nodded and went into my room, where I opened the closet and pulled out the drawers of my desk and looked over every square inch of my bookshelf and walls, at the posters and bird feathers and bird scalps and weapons above my bed, but I didn't see anything I would have wanted to sell, so I sat down on my bed and leaned back and tried going through a mental list of everything I had, my lead soldiers, my matchbox car collection, my gum wrappers, my tennis racket, my badminton racket, and my Ping-Pong racket and balls, the little clay figurines I made a while back at the Young Pioneers center; my cartoon character emblems, which I cut from plywood with a jigsaw and painted myself; my French, German, American, and Yugoslavian comic books, which I got from Father's coworkers; my hunting knife, my tomahawk, my slingshot, my bow and arrows, my toy pistols; my three old shotgun shells, which still smelled of gunpowder; my three miniature soccer teams, all of whose players were buttons; my hand-carved chessboard, which also had backgammon; all my posters, one by one; my pocket calendar with pictures of actresses, which I kept under the bottom drawer; and my thirty-six-color set of felt-tip markers, of which only the turquoise still wrote. Anyway, I just sat there looking at one thing after another and trying to imagine what it would be like if each one wasn't there, whether I'd go looking for it or want to play with it anymore. For example, I hadn't even taken those matchbox cars out of the desk drawer in at least a year, and I hadn't played badminton in a long time either, and I knew most of the comic books by heart and I hardly ever looked at them anymore, but no matter how I tried, I just couldn't imagine what it would feel like to open the matchbox drawer and see that it was all empty or to look at the shelf and not see a single comic book at all.

Meanwhile I could hear Mother in the living room opening closets and pulling drawers open, flinging out her clothes and other things, and I imagined her taking her old outfits off their hangers in the closet one after another and putting each one on the couch, so I leaned up against the wall and just sat there on my bed with my hands around my knees, listening to the rustling of clothes in the living room, but then Mother left the room, and seconds later I heard the pantry door creak open and Mother let out a big moan, I knew she was taking the suitcase off the top shelf of the pantry, and then the wheels of the suitcase kept hitting the kitchen's tile floor as Mother carried it into the room, and that's when it occurred to me that she wasn't only going through her own clothes, but maybe she was also looking over Father's shirts, ties, shoes, belts, and suits.

Before then, we never touched Father's things, we didn't even open his closet or his desk drawers so if he came home he'd find everything just the way he left it the day they came and took him away, and ever since then I stood in front of Father's closet lots of times and looked into the shiny polish of its door as if it was a mirror, and I thought of the smell the closet must have had when Father opened it to take out some hidden piece of chocolate or chewing gum, and I tried imagining that Father was standing there behind me and that the only reason I couldn't see him was because the polish was too shiny, and as I sat there on my bed listening to Mother pack that suitcase, I again tried thinking through my things one after another because I knew I'd have to pick out something anyway, but then I started remembering when I got each one or where I got it from, plus what I'd done with it or wanted to do with it, and I knew this just wouldn't work, that I wouldn't be able to pick out anything this way either, and then I clearly heard Mother opening Father's closet door and giving a big sigh, and I heard the rustling of Father's suits as Mother threw them one after another onto the couch, and then I stood up and stopped in the middle of my room and snooped slowly around like I did whenever I played search-the-premises or pretended I was a burglar, as if it wasn't even my own room but some stranger's, as if I didn't know what anything was and where it was from and what it was for, as if I was simply looking for something, and that everything else was just in the way, and then suddenly I heard Mother sniffling softly out in the living room, so I knew for sure that she was packing
Father's clothes, and then I leaned down and pulled an empty cardboard box out from under my bed, a box I wanted to cut up into a suit of armor for the next time my friends and I had ourselves a little costume party, and I went over to my shelf and began taking things off it one after another, and without picking and choosing at all I just threw all my comic books, model airplanes, and hand-painted lead soldiers into the box, and I didn't stop even when my old stamp album ended up in my hands, no, I placed even that right in the box, and then my slingshot and my blowgun too, and my Indian books and hunting books, one after another, and I went over to my desk and pulled out the matchbox drawer and poured all my cars into the box, but then one of the cars, the red Ford with the doors you could open, accidentally fell on the floor, so I leaned down and picked it up before putting it in the box by the other cars, and then I set the drawer on the floor and I stood up on my bed and tried taking my posters off the wall, but I couldn't do that as fast, no, I was worried they'd rip, I'd glued them to the wall because I didn't have thumbtacks and I was especially worried about those double-page soccer team posters I'd gotten from an illustrated magazine and about my movie posters with Indians on them, and about the picture of that champion goalie with his signature specially printed on it, so anyway, I had to be really careful taking those posters down so that even if the paint peeled off the wall at least the pictures themselves wouldn't rip, and I did it by leaning up against the wall and squeezing my palm under the middle of each poster and then working them off like that, one by one, and then I put them all on my bed, I laid the posters on top of one another and rolled them up together and set the whole bundle in the corner of the cardboard box, and then I went over to my desk and from the shelf above it I removed my badminton rackets and my genuine rubber-faced Vietnamese Ping-Pong paddle and my yellow competition-grade Ping-Pong balls, all four of them, and I put all of that into the box too, and then I opened the closet and took out my button-soccer box containing not only my three champion teams but also the goals I'd made from copper wire and pantyhose, to look like real netting, yes, I threw my whole button-soccer collection into the cardboard box, and as I did so I heard the buttons scatter, meaning the teams had just gotten all mixed up, but what did I care, and next I went to the closet and removed my gun belt with its fake-leather holsters containing my two plastic pistols that fired caps, and then I took out my cowboy hat, which I'd made by sewing bits of elk skin on a straw hat, and as I stood there holding the hat by the sliding copper ring of its chin strap, it occurred to me that one of the pistols must still be loaded with that red phosphorus powder I'd scratched off match heads and filled the old caps with, and I was just about to draw one of the pistols from the holster when I heard Mother out in the living room slamming down the top of the suitcase, so instead I just went ahead and threw the gun belt into the box and tossed the cowboy hat on top, but the box was so full already that the hat almost fell out, its chin strap got caught on the rolled-up posters and the hat just hung there, and then I heard the suitcase snap open out in the living room, its lock was really bad, it took two people to close it, one person had to press it shut while the other person locked it with the key. I heard Mother slamming down the top of the suitcase over and over again, and I heard her gasping for air while trying all by herself to click the lock shut, and I knew she wouldn't call me over to help, but I also knew I'd go out there and help her all the same.

B
EFORE THEN
, we used to think the old clay pit was closed because its wall collapsed in the big earthquake, revealing a bunch of priceless prehistoric reliefs, but ever since Zsolt showed us a gold nugget one time, everyone knew that wasn't really why you couldn't go there, that it was actually because the quarry walls were full of gold, yes, all you had to do was swing a hammer on the slate where the veins of ore ran, and the nuggets would come flying right out of the wall. Zsolt told us he stole the gold nugget out of his dad's desk drawer, from beside his railway worker's ID and worker's medals, and he even let us take it into our hands, it was damn heavy, it was real gold, no doubt about it. Often we wanted to go to the clay pit and give it a try to see if we could really get ourselves some gold, but as long as old Mr. Vászile guarded the site with his two German shepherds it didn't work out, because he was there day and night, he lived in an old trailer and never let anyone into the clay pit or even onto the property around it, and he never kept his dogs chained, one time when Zsolt climbed over the fence on a dare, one of the dogs bit his ankle so bad that afterward Zsolt had to get thirty shots in his belly, so when we got the news that Mr. Vászile had hanged himself, none of us were sorry at all, and indeed we were glad to hear that he first shot both of the dogs. Zsolt said right away that we should take advantage of the opportunity and go get ourselves some gold before a new guard got appointed, yes, it would be best if we headed off right away, so we should go home and get hammers, besides, he was itching to see those prehistoric reliefs for himself.

Because the quarry was far away, we went by bicycle. I sat behind Zsolt, on the rack, and on the other bike Jancsi rode in front of Csabi. The fence was pretty high and had barbed wire up top, but at least there wasn't any barbed wire above the locked gate, and Jancsi figured out that if we leaned one bike against the gate, then from the seat it wouldn't be hard to climb up to the top, and we really did get up there pretty easy, and only when all four of us were inside did Zsolt say we were complete idiots not to have pounded off the lock with a hammer because then we could have at least brought in the bicycles too, but Jancsi just waved a hand and said it didn't matter, the important thing was that we got inside and didn't have to worry about those lousy dogs.

As for the prehistoric reliefs, I thought they would be a lot more exciting, sure, they looked nice and big, high up there on the quarry wall around twelve feet from the ground, I couldn't really imagine how the folks who made them could have climbed so high, but they sure seemed pretty worn, you could hardly tell what they were supposed to show, I could make out some sort of houses and animals and a bunch of human figures, a couple of the people were shooting with bows and arrows, and some were hunting for wild boar and for bears from a horse-drawn cart using a spear, plus there was a gigantic person lying on the ground, you couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman, and practically all that was left of the face was the eyes, the rest had been washed away by the snow and the rain, and even Jancsi said he didn't understand what was so priceless about these reliefs when you could hardly see a thing on them, but then Zsolt said he'd heard that they weren't prehistoric at all, no, the miners had made them out of boredom but then half plastered them over because they turned out so badly, and there really wasn't much to see on them at all.

Mr. Vászile's shack was there at the foot of the quarry wall under the prehistoric reliefs and around ten yards from the lake, it was a trailer with wheels, like the sort construction workers live in, and when we passed by it Zsolt said we should go in and see what the old man left behind, but Csabi then made the sign of the cross and said, "God forbid we should go in there because that would stir up Mr. Vászile's ghost, and the clay pit is haunted to begin with," but Zsolt said that was just a superstition, that he didn't believe in ghosts at all, though he himself had heard the quarry lake was full of bones, but he didn't believe even that, people said things like that only because they liked scaring each other, if the water cleared up enough, maybe he'd dive in and see for himself, and as for Mr. Vászile, he couldn't have a ghost because ghosts didn't exist at all. And when Zsolt said that, he pulled his hammer from his belt and took a couple of good whacks at the side of the trailer and yelled for Mr. Vászile's ghost to come forward if it dared.