"I just can't understand how they could do this to me!" sighs Barna Szoboszlai. He's been brooding over this since that night in July when a 46-year-old man suffered a lethal electric shock in his garden. Szoboszlai had placed live wires around his vegetable plots. Now he can't understand how the victim could have done this to him. Before we start thinking that the elderly man is either deranged or vicious, let us rise from our comfortable leather armchairs and leave the world surrounding us: the gold-embossed, leather-bound books in the bookcase, the burglar alarm connected to the nearest police station, and let us arrive with a jolt to the world where Barna Szoboszlai lives.

In exile

The elderly man is now in the mayor's office of Monok, "in exile", since the court terminated his confinement under remand and ordered house arrest. He has decided not to return to his home in the village of Kesznyéten for fear of vendetta, so for the moment there's a room offered to him by the mayor of Monok, where he is staying with his wife. Barna Szoboszlai is 150 centimetres tall, and 67 years old. One can see from his movements that he has worked hard all his life. It seems that in this region, people aren't classified on the basis of the colour of their skin or their property, but rather according to whether they work or not. Szoboszlai had to face all this at the age of thirteen, when his mother became a widow with three children. Up till then, he had worked during the summer as a young horse herder, but from then on he started working full-time for the farmer's cooperative. "That's his love, the tractor and the combine harvester, he wanted to take part in the harvesting this summer", said his wife. He has documents to prove that he used to be the best harvester in the country.

Ever since his childhood, he has always risen early in the morning, at four-thirty. Prior to the tragedy, he used to see to his own property first, there are still ducks and geese waddling about on the farm in Kesznyéten, and Bantam chickens scratching about in the deserted yard. Then he would leave for work, which he started at seven-thirty. In the last few years, he had been working for a local landowner who, in return, gave him machines with which to till his own land and four hectare woods. Then after work, he would go home and work in his own - 2100-square-feet - garden until it got dark. The pension he receives is only fifty thousand forints; his wife gets nothing at all, so they need to supplement their income.

He built a house for each of his three daughters, and set them up for life as is right and proper. Only when we arrive in their street and look for the double-gate they have been telling us about with such pride, do we realize, with surprise that this is not a place where prosperous people live: even from far away, their house reveals that it is the dwelling of elderly people who have to struggle to make a living. By prosperous, we do not mean a Western car or trips abroad ("They laughed at me", said his wife, "when they heard that this was the first time I had ever been to Budapest, when we went to the studio."), but that there is meat on the table every day.

A fatal error

"I switched on the electricity at ten o'clock at night, and switched it off again at half past four in the morning, in case some child should be mooching about," says the man. He had only wanted to protect his - now famous - cucumbers, he lost his temper when the first crop he had planted was stripped.

"Well, that was when I decided to run electricity through some wires I had placed among the vegetable patches. I didn't want anyone to be electrocuted, I just wanted to keep away the thieves. That was why I let it be known all around the village," he said. He felt there was no other way of protecting himself and his produce. His dog had been poisoned, the battery with which he had first protected his produce had been stolen. He had thought - erroneously - that if he ran only one-phase current into the wire with which he enclosed his vegetables, the thief would get a shock, but wouldn't die. He maintains to this day that the rain caused the tragedy. It wasn't the rain, though.

"How could he have done this to me? Look where I am now," he keeps repeating. The victim's mother was a frequent visitor at the Szoboszlai's house. The day Barna Szoboszlai was led away by the police, he had planned to slaughter six ducks, and give one to the victim's family. So the people who had visited his garden during the night were the same as those toadying to him during the day, and they couldn't have been hungry, since they had received their welfare payments earlier that day.

"I always gave them something if they were in need," he keeps repeating, and that's what the Romas, who gathered in the street outside his house, said too.

"He's a good man, he never sent me away. "Uncle Barna, I don't have anything to give to my children. If you could spare a few potatoes, I'll pay for them as soon as I have the money", relates a man who turns out to be the nephew of the victim. With his hand he signals that he usually didn't have enough to give back the loan.

If you want to know what Kesznyéten is like, imagine that the houses of Budapest are mixed up at night, and in the morning, the owner of a villa in Rózsadomb suddenly wakes up in Józsefváros (8th district), and some houses of the Havanna housing estate are somehow placed onto Pasaréti street (2nd district). For those who are used to living on just welfare payments, the courtyards and vegetable gardens of those elderly people - who are used to working hard, who lead the life of farmers - is paradise itself, with legs and ribs walking on two or four feet ("they stole a porker of mine, weighing one hundred kilograms,") and the tender, fresh vegetables look so inviting. The risk is not high, the authorities usually misinterpret the law, because although it is true that stealing something that is worth less than twenty thousand forints is not a crime, this is valid only if it is lying in the street, unattended. However, this rule is applied to thefts taking place in the garden, in other words, it is the notary who must investigate, which is, let's face it, an absurdity. Especially if we consider that if someone intrudes into the garden in the middle of the night, or during the day, but with three others, say, that in itself can be punished with imprisonment.

"I'm not the only person in the village to protect my property with electricity," says Barna Szoboszlai, and it's true that we found signs in the village which implied that electricity had been run around windows and doors.

Only if blood is actually flowing

If they do not feel the effects of the law, they make local rules. That is how those living from collecting scrap metal run electricity through piles of scrap iron, in order to prevent thieves from stealing the metal from their yard. They have learnt that the police only arrive if blood is actually flowing, the rest you must sort out yourself. Bertalan Gaskó, spokesman for the county's central police station, denies this. If this were true, the proportion of thefts that have been solved would not be 34 percent in the county, which is well above the national average. However, in the majority of cases, the thieves are released and can plead at large, and may return to the scene of the crime on the same day.

"I told the police that twenty of my hens had been stolen", Barna Szoboszlai tells us. "Do you know who committed the theft?" the police asked. "I told them I didn't. Now the detectives say I haven't asked the police for help in eight years."

The Szoboszlais didn't see the deceased on that tragic night, they just heard the "great tumult", the crowd of Romas, the ambulance, the police cars. The man was immediately taken away. "I always knew exactly where my wife was, the police mediated," says the man, who is grateful to them for having protected his wife and his house.

"We're not cannibals," says the victim's nephew, and you can see that he's sorry for his uncle, who died because he stole some cucumbers, and for the elderly man, whom he considers to be a good person.

"If he were a Roma, I'm sure they would not have let him out, you can bet on that," say those standing about in the street. The man, who is in his late sixties, and is accused of involuntary manslaughter and suspected of criminal negligence possibly leading to multiple deaths, plans to start a new life in Monok. But the minute their village is mentioned, the woman bursts into tears, and her husband gazes into the distance as if he had been captured and was now a prisoner of war at Doberdo.

"One of their neighbours had accused my uncle of stealing, so he said: "I'm a thief then, am I? So be it!", relates one of the nephews, Győző Farkas. "He asked for a black plastic litterbag, put on his new black shoes, which he had bought for two hundred forints that same day, and they set off. It was no good them telling him not to do it, that his new shoes would get him into trouble."

The deceased had two adult children and a grandchild. Ever since the tragedy, there has been constant police presence in the village, and last Friday, they caught a thief with twenty pullets in his sack. The elderly man would never have imagined that the cucumber would be his attribute in his old age, like the lion was in the case of Matthew the Evangelist. He has become a star of the media, thanks to his case, a hundred thousand people have realized just how defenceless they are. The story - which has only victims - is far from over. It will continue in court.