bishop makes a point of grandly greeting everyone who greets him. He rises early because he is an old man who sleeps badly; by dawn he is standing at his high desk forming tiny pearl-like letters. Others are measuring out wine in the cellars of the town hall, the wine stone cold. The vaults of the cellars are made of heavy slate: a century ago it was Poles who were drinking the wine here, the smoky marks of their torches still visible on the walls. Damp keg smells, the delicate, dense smell of alcohol and stearin candles. A bread ticket. Closing time. An endless sequence of barely noticed trains passes through town. One rumbles past now: it measures at least two or three hundred meters but the platform guard doesn’t even look up and the trains roll on carrying holidaymakers and the wounded, for here is the resort and here is the station. Some open the doors of their cars for an hour or so and the smell of carbolic and iodine oozes out to an enormous silence. The smell wafts downtown but is particularly acrid near the station. Big buckets of lime wait on the platform, for it sometimes happens that certain passengers have to be carried from the train and need to be sprinkled with it. But this is the fourth year of hostilities and the town has gotten used to it, especially those people whose job it is to sprinkle lime. They are very quiet now. There are no longer attendants in snow-white garments with red crosses on their armbands waiting at the resort station: the lady volunteers of the town are gone along with their shining uniforms that looked as crisp as those worn by wax nurse dolls displayed in the pharmaceutical department of the big store, to be replaced by, at most, two sanitary workers whose uniforms do not shine and are not crisp, and who grunt hey-upp when called upon to act as stretcher bearers. The war is a long way from here. There is only a kind of ash or soot, the kind that is carried from a distant fire and falls some distance from its source. The war will never reach as far as this. There were only telegrams at the beginning, and then the trains that passed through town. An elementary school had to be turned into a hospital as did half the monastery. A number of people were awarded distinctions for their services to the nation. The stationer’s window still displays the maps of Russia and France, but the nimble, plumpish old proprietor no longer nips out each morning to pin tiny flags on them to mark the victories of the Central Powers with his own fair hands; in fact he tends not to put pins anywhere and has lost a little weight for no one pays attention to the maps now. The town has become accustomed to the war. No one talks about it, rushes out for special editions of the local paper, or bothers to pick up the national press at the station. The town has become accustomed to the war in the way one can get used to old age, the thought of death, to anything at all. The roads are a little neglected, a lot of people go about in mourning dress, some familiar faces have disappeared, but you can’t deny that a few sprigs of well-being are blossoming in the ruins. The war is a distant hourglass, sand mixed with human remains, but this morning you could see the treasurer in his gray morning suit and yellow elastic-sided boots in the public gardens, girls who were children only four years ago but are now slender young ladies strolling down the promenade, girls to whom men turn their minds despite the war. It is a small, clean, and colorful town, a toy town in its gift box. There is a lot of litter everywhere now, houses are not repaired, old notices in groceries inform the public that salted fish are expected, but that’s about all. Red, blue, and yellow advertisements on street columns. And, here too, those who are doing well can find opportunities for helping themselves. Every afternoon the town clerk may be seen ambling through Szent János Square with his vizsla hound, heading for the embankment to play fetch.
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