Read Journey by Moonlight for Free Online Page B

plans of some big company to harvest coconuts. Ervin listened, smoked, and gazed at Éva. Éva was quite unlike her usual self. She simpered, she put on airs, she was womanish. I was utterly miserable. I felt like a dog discovering that two other dogs have come to share his privileged place under the family table. I growled, but really I wanted to howl with misery.
    “I began to visit less often. I arranged to call when Ervin and János weren’t there. Besides, we were approaching our school-leaving exams. I had to take them seriously. What’s more, I made a huge effort to drill the essential information into Tamás. Somehow we got by, Tamás on the strength of my cramming him—mostly he didn’t even want to get out of bed. And after that there began a whole new phase of life at the Ulpius house.
    “Now everything changed for the better. Tamás and Éva emerged as the stronger personalities. They completely assimilated Ervin and János into their way of life. Ervin relaxed his morbid severity. He adopted a terribly kind, if somewhat affected, manner, speaking always as if in quotation marks to dissociate himself in some way from what he was saying or doing. János was more quiet and sentimental.
    “In time we got back to the play-acting, but the plays were now much more crafted, enriched by János’s escapades and Ervin’s poetical fantasy. János naturally proved a great actor. His declamation and sobbing were always over the top (because what he really wanted to play was unrequited passion). We had to stop in mid-scene for him to calm down. Ervin’s favourite role was a wild animal. He did a wonderful bison, slain by Ursus (me), and an extremely accomplished unicorn. With his single mighty horn he shredded every obstacle—curtains, sheets, and the rest of us put together.
    “During that period our horizons gradually opened out. We began to go for long walks among the Buda hills. We even went bathing. And then we took up drinking. The idea came from János. For years he’d told us stories about his exploits in bars. Apart from him, the best drinker among us was Éva—it was so hard to tell whether she was drunk or just her normal self. Ervin took to drinking with the same passion as with his smoking. I don’t like to confirm a prejudice, but you know how strange it is when a Jew hits the bottle. Ervin’s drinking was every bit as odd as his Catholicism. A sort of embittered plunging headlong into it, as if he wasn’t simply getting drunk on Hungarian wine but on some vicious substance like hashish or cocaine. And with it, it was always as if he was saying goodbye, as if he was about to drink for the very last time, and generally doing everything as if for the last time in this world. I soon got used to the wine. I came to depend on the feeling of dissolution and the shedding of inhibition it produced in me. But at home the next day I would feel horribly ashamed of my hangovers, and always swore I’d never drink again. And then when I did drink again, the knowledge of my own weakness grew, as did the sense of death, which was my overwhelming feeling during these years of the second phase at the Ulpius house. I felt I was ‘rushing headlong towards ruin’, especially at those times when I was drinking. I felt I was irretrievably falling outside the regular life of respectable people, and everything my father expected of me. This feeling, despite the horrible agonies of remorse, I really enjoyed. By this stage I was virtually in hiding from my father.
    “Tamás drank very little, and grew steadily more taciturn.
    “Then Ervin’s religiosity began to affect us. We had by now started to look at the world, at the reality we’d always shied away from, and it terrified us. We believed that man was degraded by his material needs, and we listened reverently to Ervin who told us we must never follow that path. We too began to pass judgement on the whole modern world with the same severity and dogmatism as Ervin