M I C HAEL S M AL L, W RITER MONDAY, 7 FEBRUARY 2011
PUSKAS They believed he was a flasher, Miklos. Perhaps it was the loose-swinging gabardine raincoat and the shifty, downcast eyes. Or because he was cleaner of the boys’ toilets at the high school, dropping deodorant lollies into the gutter of the urinals, running a mop over wet lino, rolling up the tangled streams of toilet paper, occasionally putting on gloves to scrub graffiti off the walls and shit off the mirrors. Something sour from that stench lingered on his pores, his beard, his gabardine raincoat. Not so pungent, more mouldy, but a sour smell all the same . . . lying face-down in a field of turnips not yet harvested on that bitterly cold November night. Which he remembered every day since, his aching belly, his fatigue, his faintness, the village dogs barking across ploughed fields at the Hungarian fugitives or invisible Russians, taking shelter in a hay shed, then disturbed by two men with a gun, a map, matches and a small bundle from which they pushed at him a scrap of reddish-grey meat; dog-meat under-baked. It was against his religion, eating animals, furry animals that is, but you didn’t refuse gifts from strangers in the dark or informers. Even frightened peasants might turn you in. the frog lives in the silent lake And you didn’t refuse to honour that dog, too often in nightmares, even though dogs were simply shot if they roamed more than a hundred yards beyond the village limits. Like thousands of refugees that November, twenty-five thousand. Inside the Animal Shelter he slid the bolt to the first pound and shuffled down the walkway between cages. Cowed in corners, heads buried in the matting of bellies or crooks of legs, what passed as dogs were waiting, on dark patches of stone, waiting for the death knock. Between the bars of an empty cage, Miklos shocked himself with a glimpse of memory . . . a scarfed head, his mother, bowed over the stove, frying smoked ham