TE23 Double Feature

Andrea Tompa

The Hangman’s House

Palocsay as well, and her sister’s classmate Pisti had tried to catch the Girl’s eye during Square, looking amusedly at the floor-length uniform, it looked as if she’d been sewn into a sack and now was going to be thrown into the sea for punishment, but she didn’t notice because her eyes were on the big girls and she was imagining that she was going to get in their good books, become the fifth member of the gang, and the biology lesson did in fact begin ten minutes late, and the forty strong class of VIII-C stood tensely in the room smelling of paraffin when doctor Antal entered with a great big class register bound in canvas with embroidered letters on it under his arm and slammed the door behind him as hard as he could so that first the lid on the ancient upright piano fell down, then after a second-long interval the portrait of one-ear dropped with a crash into the gap between the blackboard and the dais, the glass cracked from end to end and on the teacher’s blotchy head a vein swelled anew and started to throb, 356

he flung the register and the canvas depicting the palmacea species which he hadn’t finished teaching onto the desk and bawled Who’s the monitor? and the startled Girl, because, as luck would have it, it was her turn that week, stepped forward in her long dress, over which she all but tripped when she slipped out from the desk at the back by the window where she chose to sit with the dunce of the class, the cheerful Csabi Ürögdi, Who was that? shouted Antal, beside himself, Me, moaned the girl, at which Antal, biology teacher of the century old, elite Hungarian model school, once again pretended not to hear, and she looked down at the dark, oiled floor and replied calmly Comrade teacher, it was I , but she herself didn’t know how to take it: whether she meant that she was the monitor, or that she was to blame for the picture falling off the wall and breaking: who was who, which was the picture and which the original, and what had in fact broken at a few minutes past eleven in the morning. 357