Tears flood Leila’s eyes, her teeth chatter anxiously. Her mouth is dry. If the Great Lord does not perform a miracle, Leila will conclude that the Great Lord does not exist. In that case nothing makes sense, neither life, nor death; in that case Leila’s entire life, her faith, is nothing but a joke. Then she’ll take the knife, and this time when she cuts she won’t miss.

Csabi squeezes Ágika’s hand. If the miracle happens, his actions will be justified by the Great Lord’s existence. Then Csabi can kill his wife to live with another woman, since murder is just another ritual. However, if the Great Lord doesn’t show himself, then he would just be a murderer. Then he’ll sever all ties with Aurora and return to his life with Ágika, so they can march towards retirement age together, man and woman, husband and wife.

Now there is only silence and the whistling of the wind, the anticipation and the pain. This is the moment at every funeral that makes death somewhat bearable.

Hope. Hope for proof.

Hope for a miracle.

For a minute they stand in silence, the mourning crowd, people united by faith, all full of secrets, fears, anxieties, and desires. They wait for a minute, every passing second bringing them closer to the lack of certainty and they know it. By the end of the funeral, most of them will neither have gained nor lost anything.

Except for these three people.

The minute goes by, the priest takes a deep breath and shouts out to the crowd.

‘The Jaw of Saturn has not closed over us. The Nameless Lords have spat us out, we were unworthy of their attention as we are unworthy of life. Let us then bid farewell to our dead, and let the eternal stomach of the universe devour her body and soul!’

Peter bursts into bitter tears. Csabi’s heart aches, for he has lost an uncertain future that he already knows he will yearn for in a few years. Leila sighs, her muscles relax. The stress flows out of her. She accepts her fate because death is nothing but another state for her body to endure.

The priest makes a signal with his hand, and somewhere behind the walls the church superintendent pulls a lever.

Peter is fidgeting uncomfortably in the heat of the lamps, forty years earlier. The lenses, like dead eyes, are all focused on him. He stops fidgeting. In his head, he goes through the words, the arguments that they had agreed upon with Márti and the team.

‘The Sunless Slaves are the foundation of our faith. We need them to carry out our rites, both in a sacred and ordinary sense of the word. It is a great honor to be a Sunless Slave. The process itself is not so different from the practice of admitting children to a seminary or educating them to become a Buddhist monk.’