The Black Maybe by Attila Veres

Author:Attila Veres
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2022-06-24T00:00:00+00:00

The Amber Complex

The town is situated in the eastern part of Hungary, a hundred kilometers from the Ukrainian border. As such it is a place of transit, literally and figuratively as well. Most people born here move away; those who stay often face economic instability. Crime, however petty, is often a way of life for those who remain.

In this town miracles rarely happen. Especially around the outskirts, where the poorest live.

This is the story of one such miracle.

The Outskirts Pub was opened in the early ’90s by a man named Béla Ózdi and his life partner, Magdolna. They remodeled the three-room house the man had inherited from his uncle. Béla Ózdi believed two things were easy money: women and booze. There was a gypsy camp nearby in a converted Soviet military barracks, as well as the local mill, some half-abandoned industrial areas, and a number of family residences that gave off the stench of their daily miseries.

Yet, no pub in the vicinity.

Béla Ózdi invested the greater part of his savings into opening the pub. He tended to the business himself for three years, until his career was cut short by four bullets, two in the torso, one in the thigh, one in the throat that went through the jaw. Everyone suspected some sort of underworld assassination, but in fact it was his partner Magdolna and her newfound Ukrainian lover. They did it for the money. She was the brains of the operation, he was the muscle. As the police were closing in, the Ukrainian chose not to take any chances. He made a plastic bed for Magdolna and interrupted her disbelieving cries with a single headshot. After the deed he returned to his motherland, and following a couple of adventurous years and a few business missteps he ended up in the concrete foundation of a garage.

In this town happy endings are rare.

The pub was never a blockbuster success, but it wasn’t an utter financial disappointment either. All the local alcoholics and gamblers called the pub their home away from home and enjoyed the noise of the incessant sports broadcasts coming from the TV on the wall or the reckless mix of gypsy pop and national rock blasting from the digital Wurlitzer.

Fights were a constant issue. A total of three homicides were committed in the pub or its immediate vicinity, all of them under the influence of alcohol. It was common knowledge that two rapes had occurred there, though neither of them was reported to the police; nor were the countless sexual assaults that are regarded locally as ‘just playing around’. Over the past thirty years an ambulance has had to be called 237 times for medical emergencies of all sorts, in twenty-eight of which the patient’s road led from the hospital straight to the darkness of the grave. Despite the number of health complications, no one has ever died in the pub of natural causes.

Those who dwelled on the outskirts of town were either manual laborers or living off disability benefits.

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