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sterile women and impotent men coming here to Mariatal to pray for the restoration of their juices, and then he waxed serious and launched into an expose of religion, a splendid mishmash of the most desperate vulgarization of Engels, science premasticated for narrow minds — presented to us to salve his own conscience for the twelve-hundred-crown salary he was paid each month — not science popularized for the unschooled though spontaneously intelligent mind of the workingman, but rather cheap half-truths and quarter-truths for parasitical leeches who don’t give a damn about truth, not science but pseudo-science, cut-rate science, a derision and an insult to science, not truth but stupidity, a lack of sensitivity, a lack of feeling, a thick-skinned denseness impervious to the arrows of that tragically desperate poetry of a desperate dream that is to come to pass only in the hereafter of the utopian world of future wisdom (in the absence of drunken bums who feel a revulsion for manual labor and make a living by spouting ill-learned phrases memorized from tour-guides to ancient castles), the poetry of sunny pilgrimages with the voice of the organ underscored by the wail of paper whistles, and the smell of evergreens and pine needles mingling with the sweet smell of incense, and little altar boys in red and green collars, their lace-up boots poking out from under their robes,fervently bobbing the smoking censers, and the loveliness of the forest and its light and shadow and the call of the cuckoos parting to the stride of the priest dressed in gold who lifts the shining monstrance with the glowing white circle (the most perfect plane figure of the ancient Greeks) in its glittering center and holds it suspended over the bowed heads in kerchiefs and the gray hair of old farmers so that it seems to float on wisps of smoke from the burning incense, flooded by the glow of sun and forest light like a symbol of that eternal human longing and hope which will be realized here and on this earth, but which is unattainable, unthinkable without this poetic folk faith in the goodness which rules the world in the long run, faith in love, faith in justice; a faith, hope, and love that had never entered the mind of this drunken, vulgar, dense Cultural Guide.
    In our room that night the schoolteacher said to me, “Seems to me you’re not very good at handling women. That’s no way to go after a broad. Religion and dinosaurs? At that rate you’ll never get her to bed within the week, you can bet your life on it.”
    Later, Emöke told me about him. The schoolteacher had got up early and prowled around under her window, baring his yellow teeth at her, yelling his wisecracks up to her whenever she appeared atthe window to take down the white socks she washed each evening and hung out below on a taut string to dry. The schoolteacher rutted under the window while she gave him a cool and polite good morning, and he made his proposition, “Don’t you want to flush out your lungs, miss, the woods are full of ozone of a morning!” and she shook her head and told him No and he went off by himself and then all day he circled around her, his eyes glowing in his self-indulgent face, his brain chewing the cud of the few ideas at his command, not ideas, conversational stereotypes, and from time to time he would come up to her, pull one out and lay it on her, and having failed go off again, his eyes still glowing, observing her hungrily from a distance, circling around her like a ruffled rooster around an inaccessible hen from another barnyard. She told me her story, her legend. It was like the confidences that prostitutes are said to impart to their clients of girlhoods in aristocratic households, the fall and the poverty and the sorrowful selling of one’s body. She told me how they had stayed in Slovakia after the war, about her Hungarian father, a small-time official and a fascist, who had been a supporter of the Nazis and was destroyed after the