larger than usual. He was more of a worrier, moaning especially to everyone about his “bad luck.” I more or less registered his case, since it was a simple story and he went over it repeatedly. He was meant to be visiting his “very sick” mother in the Csepel district, as he related it. He had procured a special permit from the authorities; he had it on him and showed it around. The permit was valid for today up till 2:00 p.m. Something had come up, however, a matter that, he said, “could not be put off”—“for business reasons,” he added. There had been others in the office, however, so it had taken a very long time before it was his turn. He was by then beginning to think the whole trip was in jeopardy, as he put it. Still, he had hurriedly boarded a streetcar in order to get to the bus terminus, in accordance with his original plan. On the way, though, he had checked the likely duration of the return journey against the permitted deadline and worked out that it would, indeed, be rather risky to set off. But then at the bus terminus he had seen that the noon bus was still waiting there, at which, so we were informed, he thought, “What a lot of trouble I’ve gone to for that little bit of paper! . . . Besides which,” he added, “poor Mama is waiting.” He remarked that the old lady was a big concern for him and his wife. They had long ago pleaded with her to move in with them, into the city, but his mama had kept on flatly refusing until it was too late. He shook his head a lot, being of the opinion that, in his view, the old lady was hanging on to her house “at all costs.” “Yet it doesn’t even have any amenities,” he noted. But then, he went on, she was his mother, so he had to be tolerant. On top of which, he added, she was now both ill and elderly. He had felt “he might never be able to forgive himself,” he said, if he were to pass up this one opportunity. As a result, he had got onto the bus after all. At that point he fell silent for a minute. He raised, then slowly lowered, his hands in a gesture of helplessness, while a thousand tiny quizzical wrinkles formed on his brow, giving him something of the look of a sad, trapped rodent. “What do you think?” he then asked the others. Might something unpleasant come of the business? Would it be taken into consideration that his overstepping of the permitted deadline had not been his fault? And what, he wondered, must his mama be thinking, whom he had informed about the visit, not to speak of his wife and two small children at home if he failed to get back by two o’clock? Mainly from the direction in which his gaze was pointed, it seemed, as far as I could tell, that he was expecting an opinion or rejoinder on these questions from the aforesaid man with the distinguished bearing, the “Expert.” The latter, however, I could see, was not paying much attention; his hand just then was holding a cigarette that he had taken out shortly before, the tip of which he was now tapping on the lid of a gleaming silver case with embossed lettering and engraved lines. I saw from his face that he was absorbed, lost in some distant reflection, giving every sign that he had heard nothing at all of the entire story. At that point, then, the man reverted to his bad luck; if he had reached the terminus just five minutes later, he would not have caught the noon bus, for if he had not found that one still there, he would not have waited for the next, and consequently, assuming this was all through “the difference of just five minutes,” then “he would now not be sitting here but at home,” he explained over and over again.
Then too I still recall the man with the seal’s face: portly, stocky, with a black moustache and gold-rimmed eyeglasses, who was continually seeking “to have a word” with the policeman. Nor did it escape my attention that he always strove to have a go at this separately, a little bit away from the rest, preferably in a corner or by the door. “Constable,” I would