his nose knocked off, with a pipe between his teeth like the one my grandpa used to smoke; Grandpa used to have a dwarf like that in his garden too, with a pipe like that, and a white castle with lots of carved turrets and towers and real glass in the windows, and every spring he would paint the tin roof of the castle with red paint because at seventy-odd years the old man was still thrilled by the ideas that thrilled me when I was small, and thrilled me again at that moment when I remembered my grandfather’s little castle: I believed that the castle was real — small maybe, but real — and that perhaps sometimes the half-inch steps were climbed by a royal procession of people two inches tall, like Lilliputians, that there were chambersbehind the real glass windows, and salons and banquet halls just as realistic as the castle itself; and then there was the fairy tale of Tom Thumb: I dreamed of being Tom Thumb, riding around in a car wound-up with a key, or sailing the bathtub in a little boat that when you poured some chemical into the stern sailed silently and regularly around the miniature ocean of the enameled bathtub. I stared at the ruddy, lecherous, beat-up ice of the clay dwarf and in a way it was me, myself, thirty years old, still single, mixed up in the affair with Margit, a married woman, a guy who didn’t believe in anything any more or take anything very seriously, who knew what the world was all about, life, politics, fame and happiness and everything, who was alone, not from incapacity but of necessity, quite successful, with a good salary and reasonable health, for whom life held no surprises and with nothing left to learn that I didn’t already know, at an age when the first minor physical problems begin to herald the passing of time, at an age when people get married at the last moment so as still to be able to have children and watch them grow up only to find out equally fast exactly what life’s all about, and she, pretty and still young, with a child, Hungarian and hence a fairly novel being, relatively unfamiliar, but then again old enough at twenty-eight, but with a child which I supposed would mean an entirely different lifestyle, and aforeigner, Hungarian, not too intelligent, slightly warped by that parapsychological madness, out to proselytize, but heaven knows how holy, the ideal object for a vacation adventure, nothing more than that, and yet with that terrible look of a little animal of the woods, with that immense self-destructive defense mechanism against the world, in a fog of mystical superstition. For her it was a matter of life and death, not a matter of a hot evening, a meadow soft enough to lie in comfortably, a few tried-and-tested words, a well-chosen moment when the desire of summer and the mood of the week’s vacation blend to form a favorable constellation of discarded inhibitions and the will to risk and to surrender; it was in fact a matter of a lifetime of love and self-sacrifice, or of death in the mist of mysticism, in the lunacy of midnight circles that meet around round tables and summon the spirits of their visions to come to earth, circles of faded middle-aged people, misfits, psychopaths, in this twentieth century still believing in goblins and the power of frog hair over cancer, recopying Satanic psalters and speaking backward the terrible black prayers of men who had sold their souls to the Prince of Darkness — men who didn’t die a natural death but were torn asunder by the Devil, their souls ripped out from the shreds of their bodies and the tatters of bone and flesh, broken ribs, gouged eyes, flayed skins, ripped out and carriedoff to the eternal fire in the rotting guts of hell — or praying piously and not eating meat and treating ailments resulting from the constant immobility of praying by placing copper circlets against their bare skin and kissing pictures of saints, although death should be desirable, since death is presumably the gateway to a more
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