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. Many of them didn’t last till the age of retirement. The majority died from heart attacks, stroke was the runner-up, and cancer took the third spot. Out of every ten people there was only one who didn’t drink on a regular basis and only three who didn’t smoke. Each and every one of them begged and cried at night for a brand-new start somewhere else, as somebody else.

This is where Gábor Szeiber grew up. He remembered Béla Ózdi from his childhood. Gábor lived one street away from the pub, in a socialist-style family house. It was shaped like a cube, the ceiling was too low, the rooms cramped, the garden only an afterthought. His father had built a gate out of scrap metal and painted it yellow. This town is known for its outrageous attitude toward colors.

Gábor would often go to the pub to buy cigarettes for his father. One Sunday when the family TV stopped working Béla Ózdi let him watch the afternoon Disney cartoons there. DuckTales was interrupted by the news of Prime Minister József Antall’s death, an interruption that caused a generational trauma. The boy walked home with tears in his eyes, like so many others that day all over the country. Later the police contacted Gábor because he was one of the last people to see Béla Ózdi alive. He had long considered this to be the defining event in his life, and it wasn’t far from the truth.

At the age of forty-four his father bent over to lift up a trailer and collapsed. The runner-up: stroke. The doctors said the tissue in his brain had gotten thin over time. Those forty-four years were all he was given, and they couldn’t have done anything to save him. It was a life-altering event for Gábor. After they had discreetly buried his father’s body, Gábor vowed to step out of his parents’ shadow, move away from his hometown, and make a splendid career in whatever suited his talents.