The Melancholy of Resistance

He stopped in the half-light, smiling in confusion, and, since Eszter was all too well acquainted with his pathetic and overwrought emotional state on arrival, he calmed him, gesturing, as if by way of greeting, in a manner impossible to refuse, that he should take his customary place at the table used for smoking, thaw himself out after his frosty journey and wait for the fire of his enthusiasm to die down while his old friend amused him with a few well-chosen observations. ‘We won’t be having any more snow then,’ he began without preamble, delighted to continue his previous, solitary train of thought, thereby subsuming all the things that had preoccupied him since morning once the time allowed for washing and dressing had elapsed and Mrs Harrer had, to his greatest relief, departed, ‘as one might boldly state judging from the state of the world at this moment in time’. It would not have been his style to get up and check the validity of such an authoritative statement with his own eyes, to ask the excited visitor currently sitting in the armchair to draw the heavy curtains, stare at the melancholy empty street and observe sheets of newsprint running before swirling waves of icy wind and paper bags passionately swooping between tomb-like houses frozen into silence, in a word to look out on his behalf, for to look out through the enormous windows clearly intended for better days was, in his opinion — he being a master of resistance to redundant gesture — utterly pointless since an act in itself could never be worthwhile given that the question to which it appeared to provide an answer was probably the wrong question, therefore the only question of any importance on waking, to wit whether it was snowing outside or not, could be settled just as well from his present position on the bed facing away from the firmly curtained casement windows, for the peace associated with Christmas, the happy ringing of bells, the very snow itself was somehow forgotten in this eternal winter — if this harsh regime of penetrating cold, when the last, light passion of his own existence was to decide what was to face ruin first: the house or its inhabitant, could be called winter at all. As regards the former, it was still standing after a fashion, despite the fact that Mrs Harrer, who was hired to light the fire at dawn — and no more — came round once a week under the guise of cleaning and, armed with her broom and the rags she called her dusters, set about the house to such effect that she seemed to be trying to accomplish inside that which the frost was very effectively doing outside: she flapped about violently with the rag; lithe and ready for combat, time and again, with inimitable ill-luck, she assailed the hall, the kitchen, the dining room and the rooms at the back; week after week, while little ornaments showered about her, she went about her scrubbing with generous lashings of water and shoved around sensitive pieces of furniture with cracked surfaces and highly unstable legs; in the name of cleaning she occasionally broke a piece or two of the delicate Viennese and Berliner dinner service, so he might reward her good intentions — much to the decided satisfaction of local antique dealers — with a silver spoon or a volume bound in leather; in other words she swept and wiped and washed and tidied everything so remorselessly that the poor building, attacked both inside and out and by now in a perilous state, offered only one place of refuge where things might remain as they used to be — the spacious drawing room, where this ‘ham-fisted champion of domestic order’ (‘Disturb the director at his work? Certainly not!’) never dared to enter. Of course it was impossible to tell her to stop and occupy herself solely with that for which she was paid, for apart from the implied rudeness this might involve — and Eszter always avoided having to give orders or indeed anything that smacked of decision — it was clear that the woman, even if she could not gain access to him or his immediate surroundings, driven as she was by some mysterious force of charity, felt obliged to enter the bitter lists of battle against whatever objects still remained unbroken and would continue even if she were expressly forbidden, a predicament that offered the owner no option but the safe harbour of his own drawing room, which was not altogether an imposition since here he could be understood to pursue the alleged musicological research which enhanced his reputation in the town, and since this misconception kept Mrs Harrer at bay he had no cause to fear for the delicate ornaments and furnishings immediately surrounding him, and, what was more, could be certain that owing to this fortunate misapprehension nothing would disturb him in his real mission, which he referred to as his ‘strategic withdrawal in face of the pathetic stupidity of so-called human progress’. The stove with its graceful copper feet was ‘merrily blazing’ as they say, and as it happens, this was the only item in the room which did not immediately betray the fact that time had terminally ravaged it: for the once-splendid Persian rugs, the silk wallpaper, the useless chandelier dangling from the cracked ceiling rose, the two carved armchairs, the settee, the marble-covered smoking table, the etched mirror, the dull, precarious Steinway and the countless cushions, tapestries, pieces of porcelain bric-à-brac, all these inherited memorials of the family drawing room, each and every one of them, had long ago given up the hopeless struggle and the only thing that prevented them from crumbling and disintegrating where they stood was, in all likelihood, the ten years’ worth of dust that thickly insulated them and, perhaps, his own mild, permanent, practically stationary presence. Continued presence and involuntary vigilance, however, do not in themselves constitute a state of health nor a particularly powerful assertion of the life-force, since, after all, the most funereal of positions was undoubtedly taken by the faithful occupant of the once ornamental chaise-longue which had been dragged some time ago from one of the bedrooms, by that man lying on high plumped pillows whose practically skeletal body could only with the greatest of charity be described as gaunt, whose ruinous condition testified less to the understandable revolt of the organs than to the constant protest against the powers that attempted to slow the natural if violent process of deterioration and the spirit that had mercilessly condemned itself, for reasons of its own, to a life of ease. He lay on the bed, motionless, his hands resting exhausted on the moth-eaten blanket in a perfect image of his by-now-stable constitution, which was not in the grip of some slow progressive disorder of the bones such as Scheiermann’s Disease, nor under the threat of a sudden, potentially fatal infection, but had suffered a complete collapse, the serious consequence of allowing the muscles, the skin and the appetite to degenerate through permanent self-confinement to bed. It was the body’s protest against the soft entrapments of pillow and rug, though it would be equally true to say that this was all it was, for the wilful regime of rest which nowadays only Valuska’s visits and the usual morning and night-time rituals managed to break, that final withdrawal from the world of action and sociability, had no effect upon his determination and steadfastness of soul. The carefully groomed grey hair, the clipped moustache, the severe harmonization of his well-matched daily garments, all betrayed as much: the hems of the trousers, the starched shirt, the meticulously knotted tie and the deep maroon dressing gown, but, above all, the still-bright pale-blue eyes set in that pale face, eyes still razor sharp which had only to sweep over his decaying circumstances and his own body to register his highly efficient personal preservation and detect the tiniest signs of deterioration beneath the vulnerable surface of his charming and graceful possessions, which, he could clearly see, were all woven of the same ephemeral fabric of form as himself. And it was not only the common condition of self and domain that he perceived with such acuity, but the deep sense of kinship that undoubtedly existed between the deathly calm of the room and the lifeless cold of the world outside: the sky, like some remorseless mirror, always reflecting the same world, dully turning back the sadness that rose in billows beneath it, and in the twilight, which every day grew a little darker, showed the bare pollarded chestnut trees in the moment before their final uprooting, bent before the biting wind; the trunk-roads were deserted, the streets empty, ‘as if only stray cats and rats and a few pigs living on scraps’ remained, while beyond the town, the bleak deserted plains of the lowlands questioned even the steady gaze of reason that attempted to penetrate them — this sadness, this twilight, this barrenness and desolation, could all be said to have found an equivalent in Eszter’s drawing room with its desert-places, in the all-consuming rays emitted by the fixed dogma which united nausea, disillusion and the bed-bound routine, rays that could penetrate the armour of both form and surface, to wreck the fabric and substance; the wood and cloth, the glass and steel, of everything from floor to ceiling. ‘No, we shan’t have any more snow,’ he declared again, casting a placid, calming glance at the nervous visitor wriggling impatiently in his chair, and leaned forward to smooth ruffles in the blanket covering his feet. ‘No more snow.’ He sank back on his pillows. ‘Snow production has come to an end, therefore not one solitary drop will ever fall again, and, as you well know, my friend,’ he added, ‘between ourselves, that is the least of it …’ So saying, he waved his hand once in a single careless gesture, for he had already employed that same mild gesture countless times before to express the same thought: the fatal early frost that had descended on a dry autumn with its terrifying loss of precipitation (‘Ah, happy years, when it came down in buckets!’) could mean only one thing, sure as the toxin, the undeniable fact that nature herself had laid down her tools and finished her regular task, that the once-brotherly bond between heaven and earth was well and truly broken, and that the last act had assuredly begun wherein we were orbiting alone among the scattered detritus of our laws and ‘would soon be left staring, as fate had decreed, idiotically, uncomprehendingly, watching and shivering as the light steadily withdrew from us’. Every morning, as she was leaving, Mrs Harrer would stop at the partly opened door and unfailingly regale him with increasingly improbable horror stories, now of the water-tower that was clearly wobbling, now of the cogwheels that spontaneously began to turn in the belfry of the church in the main square (today, as it happened, she had chattered about ‘a gang of desperadoes’ and about some tree that had been uprooted in Hétvezér Passage), though he himself no longer considered these events at all improbable, and did not doubt for a moment that the tidings — despite the congenital stupidity of the messenger — were in every respect true, since for him these were absolute confirmation of that which he could not have helped guessing: the chain of cause and effect and hence the notion of predictability were both of them illusions, ‘therefore the clear light of reason was forever obscured’. ‘It’s all up with us,’ Eszter continued, his gaze slowly trawling round the room before focusing meditatively on the stove with its flying, quickly fading sparks. ‘We have failed in our thoughts, our actions and our imaginations, even in our pitiful attempts to understand why we have failed; we have lost our God, forfeited the socially restraining forms of respect owing to honour and rank, neglected to maintain our nobly misplaced belief in the eternal laws of proportion which enabled us to estimate our true worth by relating it to the degree of our failure to measure up to the ten commandments … in other words we have come a cropper, come a painful cropper in the universe which, it appears, has ever less to offer us. If one is to believe the babblings of Mrs Harrer,’ he smiled at Valuska, who was vacillating between utterance and rapt attention, ‘people are talking about apocalypse and the last judgement, because they do not know that there will be neither apocalypse nor last judgement … such things would serve no purpose since the world will quite happily fall apart by itself and go to wrack and ruin so that everything may begin again, and so proceed ad infinitum, and this is as perfectly clear,’ he raised his eyes to the ceiling, ‘as our helpless orbiting in space: once started it cannot be stopped.’ Eszter shut his eyes. ‘I’m feeling dizzy; I’m dizzy and, God forgive me, bored, like everyone else who has succeeded in ridding himself of the notion that there is any suggestion of rhyme or reason in making or breaking, in birth or death, in this constant and agonizing going round in circles, postulating some enormous wonderful plan rather than a cold, mechanical, blindingly simple movement … That once perhaps … in the remote past … there might have been some feeling to the contrary,’ he cast another glance at the wriggling figure of his guest, ‘is, of course, possible, but today, in this vale of tears come all too true, it might be better for us to keep silent on the subject, at least to leave the hazy memory of the being that set all this in motion to fade away in peace. Better to keep silent,’ he repeated in slightly more ringing tones, ‘and not speculate about our late creator’s no doubt exalted purposes, for as to guessing how we might best have directed them we have guessed quite enough, and clearly haven’t got anywhere in the process. We have got nowhere in this nor in anything else, because, as it is appropriate at this juncture to point out, we have not been over-generously blessed with the desirable gift of clear sight; the all-consuming over-active curiosity with which we have time and again assailed the sensible world has, not to put too fine a point on it, been far from a resounding success, and when, on the odd occasion, we have discovered some piddling secret we have immediately had cause to regret it. If you will forgive a joke in poor taste,’ he wiped his brow, ‘picture the first man to throw a stone. I throw it up, it comes down again, how splendid, he might have thought. But what really happened? I throw it up, it comes down, it strikes me on the head. The lesson is: experiment, but with caution,’ Eszter gently admonished his friend. ‘Better to be satisfied with the meagre but at least harmless truth, the validity of which we all, excepting of course your own angelic self, may prove upon our pulses; the truth that, when it comes down to it, we are simply the miserable subjects of some insignificant failure, alone in this simply marvellous creation; that the whole of human history is no more, if I may make myself clear to you, than the histrionics of a stupid, bloody, miserable outcast in an obscure corner of a vast stage, a kind of tortured confession of error, a slow acknowledgement of the painful fact that this creation was not necessarily a brilliant success.’ He reached for the glass on his bedside table, took a gulp of water, and glanced enquiringly at the armchair, establishing, not without a certain anxiety, that his faithful visitor, who had long outgrown the domestic role of selfless general help, was more than usually restless today. Clutching the suitcase full of clothes with one hand and a small slip of paper with the other, Valuska looked as if he were cowering in his own shadow or nestling between the spread petals of his never-to-be-removed postman’s cloak as the mild and sober shower of Eszter’s words fell upon him; and he was obviously more and more confused about what he should do. It seemed to Eszter that he was trying to decide whether to yield to his attentive and sympathetic nature and hear his elderly friend through without interrupting him or, rather, to follow his usual habit and, as if by way of relief, immediately give vent to the sense of wonder that overtook him as he walked like an angel through the night- and dawn-silenced streets — and as it was clearly impossible to assent to both impulses at once, Eszter was no longer surprised to see the early signs of such confusion in him. He was used to Valuska’s entrances, to see him swept through the door on a wave of agitation — it was an entrance hallowed by tradition — and accepted the fact that ‘till Valuska could master his inexpressible joy at one or other cosmic phenomenon’ it was up to Eszter to entertain his guest with his own brand of bitter and severely critical humour. This was how it had been between them for years: Eszter talked, Valuska listened, until the moment when the expression on his disciple’s face softened and gave way to the first gentle smile, when the host would be delighted to hand over to his guest, since it was not the content, only the initially passionate manner of his young friend whose answers were full of such ‘wonderful blindness and unsullied charm’ that ever disturbed him. It was one long unbroken story related in the stuttering and excitable prose his visitor had regaled him with each noon and every late afternoon for the last eight years, an endless fantasia of the planets and the stars, the sunlight, the ever-turning shadows, and the silent mechanism of the heavenly bodies orbiting overhead, which provided ‘silent proof of the existence of an ineffable intellect’ and had enchanted him all his life as he stared into the eventually over-clouded firmament on his eternal wanderings. For his part, Eszter chose not to make any objective comment on such cosmic matters, though he often joked about the ‘perpetual orbiting’ as if by way of light relief (‘No wonder,’ he once winked exaggeratedly in the direction of the armchair, ‘that after thousands of years of the earth spinning about its axis people should find themselves somewhat disorientated, since their whole attention is devoted to simply remaining on their feet …’), though later he desisted even from such interventions, regarding them as thoughtless, not only because he feared destroying Valuska’s delicate and brittle vision of the universe, but because he believed it might be a mistake to attribute the sad condition of humanity past or to come to the ‘otherwise genuinely unpleasant enough’ necessity of mankind rambling aimlessly through the universe since time immemorial. In the ascending hierarchy of their conversations, the subject of the heavens therefore lay wholly in Valuska’s territory, and this was, in every sense, fair enough: quite apart from the age-old impossibility of seeing the heavens at all through such dense clouds (so dense that even to refer to them would have been a little untactful), he was convinced that Valuska’s cosmos had no relation whatsoever to the real one; it was, he thought, an image, something remembered from childhood perhaps, only an image, of some once-glimpsed universal order, an order that had become a personal domain, clearly a luminous landscape that could never be lost, a pure religion which assumed that there was or might once have been a heavenly mechanism ‘driven by some hidden motor of enchantment and innocent dreaming’. While the local community ‘given its natural inclination’ regarded Valuska as no more than an idiot, he, for his part, was in no doubt (though he only became aware of this once Valuska took on the role of his personal meal-provider and general help) that this apparently crazy wanderer on the highways of his own transparent galaxy, with his incorruptibility and universal, if embarrassing, generosity of spirit, was indeed ‘proof that, despite the highly corrosive forces of decadence in the present age, angels nevertheless did exist’. One superfluous phenomenon, however, Eszter immediately added, did not indicate merely that people had ceased to note and were actively neglecting such beings, but that, in his own view, the refined sensibilities and spirit of observation that registered such generosity and incorruptibility as distinct virtues and ornaments did so in the certain knowledge that there was nothing, nor ever was anything, to which such virtue might refer or quality ornament, or, to put it another way, that it referred to or ornamented some singular, useless and undemonstrable form — like some kind of excess or overflow — for which ‘neither explanation, nor apology’ existed. He loved him as a lonely lepidopterist might love a rare butterfly; he loved the harmless ethereal nature of Valuska’s imagined cosmos, and he shared his own thoughts with him — about the earth naturally, which, too, in its way, passed all understanding — because beyond the guarantee of goodwill which the regular visits of his young friend represented, which guarded him ‘against the unavoidable dangers of madness resulting from complete isolation’, this one-man audience provided him with constant proof, which confirmed, beyond all doubt, the redundancy of the angelic — and absolved him of responsibility for the possibly corrupting effects of his own solemn and deeply rational views, since his painfully constructed and precise sentences bounced off the shield of Valuska’s faith as if they were the lightest of darts, or simply went straight through him without touching a nerve or causing the slightest injury. Of course, he couldn’t be absolutely sure of this, for while it was hard enough in the regular run of things to establish what Valuska’s attention was focused on, it was clear that this time his own words had no calming effect and that the most obvious causes of his nervousness were the case and the torn sheet of note-paper in his hand. Who knows whether Eszter immediately comprehended the reasons for this continuous tension, or had any notion of the import of the piece of paper Valuska was nervously clutching and twisting between his fingers, but he suspected, even on the basis of such slender evidence, that his visitor had called on him in the office of messenger rather than friend, and, since he was horrified by the sheer idea of something addressed to him or anything that might amount to a communication, he quickly replaced his glass on the bedside table, and — if only to preserve the peace of his mind and prevent Valuska speaking — pursued his own broken train of thought with a gentle but unremitting insistence. ‘While, on the one hand,’ he said, ‘our most prominent scientists, the inexhaustible heroes of this perennial confusion, have finally and somewhat unfortunately extricated themselves from the metaphor of godhead, they have immediately fallen into the trap of regarding this oppressive history as some kind of triumphant march, a supernatural progress following, what they call, the victory of “will and intellect”, and though, as you know, I am no longer capable of being the least surprised by this, I must confess to you I still cannot understand why it should be the cause of such universal celebration for them that we have climbed out of the trees. Do they think it’s good like this? I find nothing amusing in it. Furthermore it doesn’t fit us properly: you only have to consider how long, even after thousands of years of practice, we can keep going on two legs. Half a day, my dear friend, and we shouldn’t forget it. As for learning to stand upright, allow me to cite myself as example, specifically the natural history of my illness, the course of which, as you yourself know, is to deteriorate to a condition known as Bechterew’s Disease (a process my doctor, the wise Dr Provaznyik, regards as unavoidable), and that I must therefore resign myself to the fact that I must spend the remainder of my life in one simple back position, that, in short, I should continue to live, should I live at all, in a cramped and, in the strict sense of the word, stooping posture thereby atoning for and sensibly suffering the serious consequences of our thoughtlessness in assuming an erect position sometime in the remote past … Straightening up and walking on two legs therefore, my dear friend, are the symbolic starting points for our ugly historical progress, and, to tell you the truth, I am not hopeful,’ Eszter sadly shook his head, ‘that we are capable of concluding in any nobler a manner, since we regularly waste any slight chance we might have of that, as, for example, in the case of the moon landings, which, in their time, might have pointed to a more stylish farewell, and which made a great impression on me, until, soon enough, Armstrong and the others having duly returned, I had to admit the whole thing was only a mirage and my expectations vain, since the beauty of every single — however breathtaking — attempt was in some way marred by the fact these pioneers of the cosmic adventure, for reasons wholly incomprehensible to me, having landed on the moon and realized that they were no longer on earth, failed to remain there. And I, you know, to tell you the truth … well, I’d go anywhere to be out of this.’ Eszter’s voice had dropped to a whisper and he shut his eyes as if he were imagining embarking on some ultimate cosmic flight. One could not state with any great certainty that the magical attraction of this journey through space, a longer sojourn in cavernous vastness, would have dulled his appetite, yet it never lasted for more than a few seconds at a time, and though he refused to dilute the acidity of his last remark he couldn’t leave it hanging there in all its over-hasty rawness. Not to mention the fact that the temptations of this symbolic voyage were already, at the very moment of their conception, turned upside down (‘I wouldn’t get too far in any case, and however far I had got, with my bad luck, the earth would be the first thing I saw,’ or so he figured) and that his discomfort at the slightest movement was rather greater than it appeared. He had no real desire to participate in dubious ventures, nor did the thought of casual experiments in some unfamiliar situation appeal to him, since — and he never passed up the chance to draw a sharp distinction between ‘the enchantment of illusion and the misery of its fruitless pursuit’—he knew well enough that, faced with the prospect of such a dizzying journey, all he could count on would be ‘the unique quality of his own immobility’. After fifty hard years of suffering, of trying and failing to cross the swamp that constituted the town of his birth with its marsh-like foulness and suffocating stupidity, he had found a refuge from it. That intoxicating — ah, how brief — moment of daydreaming had proved utterly ineffective against it and he could hardly deny that even a short walk through its mire was beyond his powers. Not that he did deny it, of course, that was why he hadn’t left his house in years, for he felt that even a chance meeting with another citizen, the passing of a few words at the street corner he had at last carelessly ventured out to, might cancel out all the progress he had made in his retirement. Because he wanted to forget everything he had had to suffer during the decades of his so-called directorship of the academy of music: those grinding attacks of idiocy, the blank ignorant look in people’s eyes, the utter lack of burgeoning intelligence in the young, the rotten smell of spiritual dullness and the oppressive power of pettiness, smugness and low expectation under the weight of which he himself had almost collapsed. He wanted to forget the urchins whose eyes unmistakably glittered with a desire to set about that hated piano with an axe; the Grand Symphony Orchestra he was obliged to assemble from the ranks of assorted drunken tutors and misty-eyed music lovers; the thunderous applause with which the unsuspecting but enthusiastic public, month after month, rewarded this scandalous, unimaginably awful band of incompetents whose slender talents were not fit to grace a village wedding; the endless struggle educating them to music and his vain plea that they should play more than one blessed piece all the time — all those ‘continual trials’ of his ‘monumental patience’. There were many people he wanted to wipe from his memory: Wallner, the humpbacked tailor; Lehel, the headmaster of the grammar school, whose stupidity was unsurpassed; Nadabán, the local poet; Mahovenyecz, the obsessive chess-player, employee of the water-tower; Mrs Plauf and both her husbands; Dr Provaznyik, who, with his doctor’s diploma, eventually succeeded in easing everyone’s path into the grave; they all deserved it, from the constantly crocheting Mrs Nuszbeck to the hopelessly mad chief of police, from the chairman of the local council with his eye for prepubescent girls to the very last roadsweeper, in short ‘the whole breeding ground of dark stupidity’ was to be annihilated in one fell swoop and for ever. Of course, the person he most devoutly wished to remain ignorant of was Mrs Eszter, his wife, that dangerous prehistoric beast from whom he, ‘by the grace of God’, had separated years ago, who reminded him of nothing so much as one of those merciless medieval mercenaries, with whom he had tied that infernal comedy of a marriage thanks to an unforgivable moment of youthful carelessness, and who, in her uniquely dismal and alarming essence, summed up all that ‘multifarious spectacle of disillusionment’ the society of the town, in his view, somehow succeeded in representing. Even before the beginning when, glancing up from his score, the fact of his being a husband dawned on him and he examined his spouse rather more thoroughly, he was presented with the insoluble problem of how to avoid calling his over-ripe fiancée by her astonishing Christian name (‘How can I call her Tünde, after a fairy in a poem,’ he had pondered, ‘when she looks like a sack of old potatoes!’) and though, after a while, this problem seemed relatively unimportant, he never dared utter his alternatives to it aloud. For ‘the deadly appearance’ of his marital partner, which chimed in so perfectly with the quality of the awful choir he was doomed to conduct, was as nothing to the revelation of his better half’s inner character which pointed unmistakably to something military and martinet-like, that recognized one beat and one beat only, that of the forced march, and only one melody, that of the call to arms. And since he was unable to keep step, the martial trumpet sound of her voice made him shudder, and turned his marriage into what was, in his view, a satanic cell, a trap from which it was not only impossible to escape but which made the mere thought of escape appear to lie beyond him. Instead of ‘the basic life-energy and the poor-man’s implacable need for moral certainty’ he had unconsciously expected, shamefully in retrospect, at the time of their engagement, he found himself facing something that, without exaggeration, amounted to an ‘imbecility’ that intensified from sickness to overweening ambition and a kind of ‘vulgar arithmetic’ shot through with the crude spirit of the barracks, a roughness, an insensitivity, an inferno of such deeply destructive hate and crass boorishness, that over the decades it utterly incapacitated him. He became incapacitated and defenceless because he could neither bear her nor rid himself of her (the merest mention of divorce would loose a merciless torrent of abuse on his head …), nevertheless he suffered life under a single roof with her for close on thirty years, until one day, after thirty nightmare years, his life had reached a low point ‘from which there was no descent’. He was sitting by the window of the director’s office in the converted chapel which was the music academy, pondering the significance of some unsettling comments made by Frachberger, the blind piano tuner, whom he had just let out through the door. He looked out at the pale sunset, noted people laden down with nylon bags making their way home down the dark cold streets, and the thought flashed by him that, slowly, he too should start home, when a wholly unexpected and utterly unfamiliar sense of choking seized him. He wanted to stand up, get a glass of water perhaps, but his limbs refused to move, and he understood at that moment that it was not a passing fit of airlessness but a permanent fatigue, the disgust, bitterness and immeasurable misery of over fifty years of ‘being exhausted by such sunsets and such journeys home’ that had him in its grip. By the time he arrived at the house in the avenue and shut the door behind him, he had realized he could stand it no longer and decided to lie down; he would lie down and never get up again so that he would never lose another minute, because he knew the moment he lay down in his bed that night ‘the great burden of human decline into madness, imbecility, dullness, thick-headedness, gracelessness, tastelessness, crudity, infantilism, ignorance and general stupidity’ was not something that could be slept off even in fifty more years. Throwing all his previous caution aside, he invited Mrs Eszter to leave the house at her earliest convenience and informed his office that owing to his state of physical decline he was relinquishing all his privileges and obligations forthwith; as a result of which, to his greatest astonishment, his wife disappeared just like that, as in any fairy tale, and the formal decision concerning his pension arrived a few weeks later by special post, wishing him well for his ‘outstanding work in musical research’, bearing an indecipherable scrawl for a signature, signifying that from that day forth, by the ineffable grace of fortune, he should remain undisturbed and live only for that which he now considered to have been his mission in the first place, that is to recline on his bed and banish boredom by composing, day and night, sentences like variations ‘on the same bitter theme’. Who or what he should thank for the strikingly exceptional behaviour of the institution or of his wife he had no idea, especially once the first waves of relief had washed over him, though the general conviction that his unexpected retirement was due only to the fact that his many years of research into ‘the world of sound’ had reached a last and decisive turning point was clearly based on a misapprehension, a mistaken hypothesis that was not entirely unfounded, although — in his case — it was incorrect to speak of musical research but rather of a moment of anti-musical enlightenment, something that has been glossed over for centuries, a ‘decisive revelation’ that, for him, amounted to a particularly distressing scandal. On that fateful day he was doing his customary evening round of the buildings so as to check that no one remained inside before it was locked up, and finding himself in the main hall of the academy, he saw Frachberger — clearly forgotten by the others — and as so often before, when he had come upon the old man engaged on his monthly work of tuning the pianos, he couldn’t help but hear him muttering to himself. On hearing that muttering Eszter would normally sneak out of the room without signalling his presence, a gesture born of sensitivity (or possibly distaste), and get someone else to hurry the old man up, but that afternoon he found no one, not even a cleaner, in the building, so it was left to him personally to rouse him from his meditations. Tuning fork in hand, presumably so he should distinguish more clearly between those wavering As and Es, this master craftsman lay, as was his wont, athwart the instrument, incapable of making the slightest movement without an accompanying noise, merrily conducting a one-sided conversation. At first his utterances seemed nothing but idle chatter, and as far as Frachberger himself was concerned it was indeed no more than that, but when, having found an as yet untuned chord, he cried out a second time (‘How did this sweet little fifth get here? Terribly sorry, my dear, but I shall have to take you down a peg or two …’), Eszter was all attention. Ever since he was young he had lived with the unshakeable conviction that music, which for him consisted of the omnipotent magic of harmony and echo, provided humanity’s only sure stay against the filth and squalor of the surrounding world, music being as close an approximation to perfection as could be imagined, and the stench of cheap perfume in the stuffy hall together with Frachberger’s senile croakings represented a crude violation of such transparent ideality. This Frachberger creature was the last straw that late afternoon: a fury seized Eszter and, while still in its first fit, quite against character, he frog-marched the confused ancient out of the hall, and rather than pressing the white stick into his hand, practically threw it after him. His words though were not so easily disposed of: like siren voices, they wailed inside him, torturing him, and, perhaps already suspecting where this innocent-sounding chatter would soon lead, he couldn’t put them out of his mind. Naturally enough, he recalled a sentence from his own academic training, to the effect that ‘European instruments of the last two or three hundred years have been tuned to what is known as “well-tempered” pitch’, and though at that time he had seen no particular signficance in the fact, it having been no concern of his what precisely lay beneath this simple statement, the once cheery sound of Frachberger’s solitary mumbling now suggested that it referred to some sort of mystery, a kind of vague burden that had to be shifted before it crushed his desperate belief in the perfection of musical utterance, and in the weeks following his retirement, as soon as he had survived the most dangerous vortices of his own fatigue, he set about the grinding labour of immersing himself in the subject that seemed to strike most viciously at his person. And it quickly became apparent that his immersion in the subject entailed engagement in a painful struggle of liberation against the last stubborn fantasies of self-delusion, because, once having worked his way through the dusted shelves full of relevant books in the hall, he had also worked out of his system that last illusion concerning the nature of ‘musical resistance’ with which he had tried to shore up his beleaguered values, and just as Frachberger ‘took a pure fifth down a peg or two’, so he too toned down the heroic mirage of his ideas until only those terminally darkening skies were left. Peeling away the inessential, or rather evoking the essential underlying concepts, he attempted, above all, to differentiate between musical and non-musical sound, positing that the former was distinguished by certain symmetries arising from harmonics inherent in its basic physical nature, that its characteristic quality lay in the fact that single vibrations comprised a whole series of so-called periodic waves which could be expressed in terms of relations between whole numbers; then went on to examine the essential conditions under which two sounds existed in harmonious relationship with each other, and established that ‘pleasure’, or the musical equivalent of such a sensation, was occasioned when the two above-mentioned sounds or tones produced the maximum number of harmonics and when the fewest of these were within critical proximity of each other; all this so he should be able, without the least tinge of doubt, to identify the concept of musical order and the ever more lamentable stations of its history, whose decisive conclusion he had almost reached. Because of his indifferent state of mind, whenever he learned anything new he tended to forget specific details and was obliged to refresh his memory and enlarge upon it, so it wasn’t surprising that during those feverish weeks his room was buried under a vast mountain of note-paper listing such a great mass of functions, calculations, decimal points, fractions, frequencies and harmonic indices that you could hardly walk for them. He had to understand Pythagoras and his mathematical daemon, how the Greek master, surrounded by his admiring students, established a musical system that, in its own terms, was wholly mesmeric, all through calculations based on the length of a stopped string, and he absolutely had to admire the brilliant insight of Aristoxenus, who trusted to the genuine musicianship and instinctive inventiveness of the ancient player and relied entirely on the ear, and, because he clearly heard the universal relationship betwen pure tones, believed the best course he could take was to tune the harmonics of his instrument to the famous Olympian tetrachord; in other words he had to acknowledge and marvel at the fact that ‘the philosopher most concerned with the underlying unity of the cosmos and harmonic expression’ had, from wholly distinct temperamental premises, arrived at surprisingly similar conclusions. At the same time he was forced to acknowledge that what followed, to wit the sad history of the so-called development of the science of music, demonstrated the limits of natural tuning, and to observe that the problematic process of pitching an instrument, which, owing to difficulties of modulation, firmly excluded the use of the higher registers, rendered it ever more insufferable, in other words he was forced to watch events taking their fatal course, as the essential question — the meaning and value of pitch — was gradually, step by step, forgotten. The way led through Master Salinas of Salamanca, the Chinese master Tsai-Yun, through Stevinen, Praetorius and Mersenne, to the organ-master of Halberstadt, and while this last managed to resolve this issue once and for all to his own satisfaction in his Von musikalischen Temperatur of 1691, the issue remained what it was, a complex problem of tuning, or how one might — after all — employ all seven tones of the European scale in as free a manner as possible while using instruments tuned to a fixed pitch. Reserving to himself the right to change his mind, Werckmeister cut the Gordian knot with a cavalier swish of his sword and, maintaining only the precise intervals between octaves, divided the universum of the twelve half-tones — what was the music of the spheres to him! — into twelve simple and equal parts, so that henceforth, after easily overcoming the feeble resistance of those with a vague hankering after pure tonalities and much to the understandable delight of composers, the position was established. He established this infuriating and shameful position, a position that Eszter historically associated with the most wonderful harmonies and most sublime mutual vibrations, a position in which every note of every masterpiece had, over several centuries, contrived to suggest some great platonic realm, and Eszter was shocked to find that he had been merely dallying in the noxious marshes of its simplicity, a simplicity that had in fact turned out to be ‘false to the core’. Experts flocked to praise Master Andreas’s extraordinary ingenuity though, truth to tell, he was not so much an innovator as an exploiter of predecessors, and they discussed the issue of equal tempering as if this cheat, this fraud, were the most obvious thing in the world; not only that but in their attempts to uncover the true significance of the phenomenon, those elected to enquire into the matter proved even more ingenious than the late Werckmeister himself. Sometimes they discoursed on how, following the genesis and spread of the theory of tonal equidistance, composers unfortunate enough to have been thus far immured within a prison of nine usable tones could now boldly venture into as yet unknown and unexplored territories; at other times on the fact that what they now referred to, in ironic inverted commas, as ‘natural’ tuning, constituted a serious problem of tonality that must be confronted, at which point they usually digressed to the issue of sensibility, for who would willingly forgo the unsurpassable oeuvre of ‘a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms’ simply because the performance of their works of genius entailed some teensy-weensy departure from absolute purity of pitch. ‘We must transcend petty detail,’ they all agreed, and while there were one or two uncertain ivory-tower dwellers who, in the name of appeasement, dared to talk of compromise, the great majority adopted a superior smile and slipped the term into inverted commas, nuzzling up to their readers and whispering to them in confidential tones that pure tuning was indeed a mirage and that there was no such thing as pure tone, and even if there were, what would be the point, since everything was going so swimmingly in any case … At this point Eszter gathered these evidences of human failings, these masterworks of acoustics together, and consigned them to the litter basket, thereby, unbeknown to him, causing great joy to Mrs Harrer, not to mention the nearby second-hand book dealer, and furthermore, so that this personal gesture should serve as the public declaration of the end of his painstaking studies, he felt it was time to draw the appropriate conclusions. He did not doubt for a moment that he was dealing not merely with technical matters but with issues of ‘serious philosophical import’, but it was only as he pondered more deeply that he realized that in progressing from ‘Frachberger’s tiny downward adjustment of the pure fifth’ through his passionate researches into tonality he had arrived at an unavoidable crisis of faith where he had to ask himself whether that system of harmony to which all works of genius with their clear and absolute authority referred and on which he, who could certainly not be accused of harbouring illusions, had based his hitherto unshaken convictions, existed at all. Later, once the first and undoubtedly most bitter waves of emotion had passed and his passions had cooled somewhat, he could confront whatever ‘lay in his capacity to understand’, and once he accepted this state of affairs he felt a certain lightness of spirit for having seen clearly and precisely what had happened. The world, as Eszter established, consisted merely of ‘an indifferent power which offered disappointment at every turn’; its various concerns were incompatible and it was too full of the noises of banging, screeching and crowing, noises that were simply the discordant and refracted sounds of struggle, and that this was all there was to the world if we but realized it. But his ‘fellow human beings’, who also happened to find themselves in this draughty uninsulated barracks and could on no account bear their exclusion from some notion of a distant state of sweetness and light, were condemned to burn for ever in a fever of anticipation, waiting for something they couldn’t even begin to define, hoping for it despite the fact that all the available evidence, which every day continued to accumulate, pointed against its very existence, thereby demonstrating the utter pointlessness of their waiting. Faith, thought Eszter, recognizing his own stupidity, is not a matter of believing something, but believing that somehow things could be different; in the same way, music was not the articulation of some better part of ourselves, or a reference to some notion of a better world, but a disguising of the fact of our irredeemable selves and the sorry state of the world, but no, not merely a disguising but a complete, twisted denial of such facts: it was a cure that did not work, a barbiturate that functioned as an opiate. There were ages more fortunate than ours, or so he pondered at that time; one had only to think of the age of Pythagoras and Aristoxenus, when ‘our fellow human beings’ were not only untroubled by doubt but felt no urge to depart from the assurance of their innocent childlike ways because they knew that heavenly harmonies were the province of heaven and were content that the music they contrived on their purely tuned instruments should afford them a glimpse into the vastness of interstellar space. Later though, after the so-called liberation from ordered cosmology, all this counted for less than nothing, since the confused, supercilious band who had opted for sheer chaos wanted none of it, insisting instead on the complete realization of what was only a fragile dream, which of course crumbled the moment it was touched, leaving them to cobble together what they could, a task they entrusted to people such as Salinas and Werckmeister, who dedicated their days and nights to turning falsehood into truth and succeeded so brilliantly that a grateful public could only sit back, examine itself with satisfaction and wink: perfect, just the job. Just the job, Eszter said to himself, and his first thought was whether he should chop up his old piano or simply toss it out of the house, but he soon realized that this was the least attractive way of relieving himself of the shameful memory of his credulousness, so, after briefly reconsidering the situation, he decided to leave the Steinway where it was and to seek instead some more appropriate mode of self-chastisement. Equipped with a tuning socket and a sensitive frequency meter (a hard thing to get in ‘the current commercial climate’), he began to spend ever more time at his ramshackle instrument, and because he believed that readiness was all and did nothing else, by the time he finished his task he was convinced that what he would hear could not possibly surprise him. This was a period of revisionist tuning or what he chose to call his ‘careful adjustments to the Werckmeister oeuvre’, which were, in effect, adjustments in his own sensibility, and while the former project was an unqualified success the latter was a more complex matter and he didn’t feel at all certain about it. Because, when the great day arrived that he could finally seat himself at the retuned piano and devote himself, as he had intended, to playing but one suite of music for the rest of his life (the most brilliant pearls of the higher catalogue numbers in the Wohltemperierte Klavier which were perfectly suited to his purpose), the very first piece he selected, the prelude in C Major, instead of supplying some expected ‘tremulous rainbow’ effect, fell upon his ears with such an unbearably grating din he was forced to admit that nothing could have prepared him for it. As to the famous Prelude in E-flat Minor, the sound it made on this divinely tuned instrument reminded him of nothing so much as the scene at a village wedding, where guests heaved and retched and slipped off their chairs growing ever more drunk, and the fat, squint-eyed, heavily powdered bride, more drunk than the rest, emerged from one of the back rooms dreaming of the future … To ease his suffering he attempted to play the Prelude in F-sharp Major, the one in the second book, that referred to elements of the French overture, but it sounded as dreadful as every other piece he started. Up till now he had devoted all his time to ‘universal retuning’; the time thenceforth was to be one of long and painful adjustment, a process that involved drawing deeply on his inner resources, a straining of every nerve and sinew, and when, after months of effort, he succeeded, not so much in liking but in simply bearing the ear-splitting racket, he decided to reduce his twice-two-hours-per-day to a bare sixty minutes of torture. Nor did he neglect that hour, not even after Valuska became a regular visitor; indeed, as soon as his young friend had outgrown the role of meal-provider and become his general factotum and confidant, he began to share the painful secret of his deep disillusion and daily self-punishment with him. He explained the mechanics of the scale, drawing Valuska’s attention to the fact that there was nothing mechanical about it, since the seven, apparently fixed, consecutive notes were not merely equal sevenths of a unitary octave, but seven distinct qualities, like seven stars in a constellation; he enlightened him about the limits of ‘insight’, and how a melody — precisely because of the divergency of the seven qualities — could not be played beginning at any point of the scale, since a scale was ‘not a regular series of temple steps we can run up and down on as we please, enjoying congress with the gods’; he introduced him to ‘the sorry rank of brilliant experts’, from the blind man of Burgos to the Flemish mathematician, and he lost no opportunity of treating him — by way of example, so he should know how that wonderful piece sounded when ‘performed on this most celestial of instruments’—to performances of Johann Sebastian. Over several years, day after day, every afternoon, having pushed his dinner aside after a few uninviting spoonfuls, he had shared with Valuska these regular acts of penance for his earlier foolhardiness and, now, hoping to delay the moment when he’d have to discover the secret of the screwed-up note and the nervously clutched case, he trusted to this routine once more, firmly determined to continue it by playing, ‘for his edification’, something from Johann Sebastian; but his scheme was to be frustrated either because he had left too long a gap after his last memorable remark or because Valuska had drawn on extra reserves of courage; in any case, what matters is that his bright-eyed guest got the first word in, and, however hesitantly the subsequent words followed, beginning with Valuska’s own role in the matter of the suitcase, Eszter immediately realized that his fears had not been entirely insubstantial. Not at all insubstantial — for though the message and the identity of the messenger caught him off guard … he had always known that, having left the house, his wife would not only not forgive him for booting her out but would devise some scheme to get back at him, that the cool way he told her to go called for revenge. It did not matter that the day of her departure appeared so distant as to be positively antediluvian, that many years had passed since then; not for a moment did he console himself with the thought that Mrs Eszter would never again disturb him, for though he had deliberately ‘wiped out the memory’ of the formal divorce proceedings and for all the fact that this insulated him to some degree, the theatrical business of the suitcase full of laundry forced him to admit that ‘the slut had by no means given the matter up’. He had to endure this ridiculous comedy in which week after week his gargantuan spouse, while pretending that her husband knew nothing of this secret arrangement, had, ever since his retirement, continued to do his washing and sent it back via the gullible Valuska, who had to pretend it had come from the laundry. ‘That is about the only thing she is good for, dealing with dirty washing,’ was Eszter’s opinion at the time, but now he saw what a terrible price he had to pay for his earlier carelessness, for he quickly discovered her clothes at the bottom of the suitcases and knew it was her surprisingly crude way of announcing that she would be back in the house ‘this very afternoon’. There was nothing here to suggest that the time for revenge had actually come, but it was enough to leave Eszter in a state of confusion until Valuska (who, being terrified of her, never ceased praising her) stuttered something that made it plain: Mrs Eszter’s uniquely wicked ‘scheme’ concerned the near future rather than the present. She did not intend moving in immediately, it was simply a way of hinting that she could do so at any time, a form of blackmail; all she was asking, it appeared from the note, was that he should take his place at the head of some campaign for moral rearmament, which had, so to speak, ‘chosen him as leader’. She was sending a list, Valuska added enthusiastically, mumbling as usual, a list of all the local citizens’ names who should be won round to the cause, so he must start immediately — it was a race against time — doing the rounds of the houses, not tomorrow but today, immediately, now, for every minute was precious — and so that he should be in no doubt what was waiting for him if he failed to act, to end with she hinted at ‘an evening over supper together …’ Rather than say anything while his friend was still in full flow, he didn’t open his mouth even after Valuska — almost certainly cowed by the low, scheming hag — had ceased praising her ‘loyalty and unprecedented tenderness’, but lay silently among the soft cushions of the once ornamental chaise-longue, his eyes following the sparks as they leapt from the fireplace. Should he resist? Should he tear the slip of paper up? Should he attack her with an axe, much as sensitive freshmen might attack a piano at the unguarded academy, if she dared approach the house ‘sometime in the evening’? No, Eszter said to himself, there was nothing he could do in the face of such wile and power, so he pushed back the covers and sat with bent back on the edge of the bed before slowly divesting himself of his maroon dressing gown. He told his friend, who was inexpressibly relieved to hear it, that he was obliged, however briefly, to suspend ‘the inestimable pleasures of soothing oblivion’ because ‘testes vis maior’ etc., a decision that was made quickly, not so much because he was frightened out of his wits, but because he immediately perceived that, being as unwilling as he was to engage in warfare and wishing to avoid the worst, it was the only position he could adopt; he had, in effect, to yield to blackmail without the least struggle and not to think about it any longer, though this did not apply to the thought of having to move out; indeed, after having entrusted Valuska with the task of ‘disinfecting’ the place by depositing the suitcase — temporarily — at the furthermost point of the house (‘The suitcase, at least, can be moved, if not the sense of her presence …’), he hesitated in front of the wardrobe in some confusion. It wasn’t that he doubted his judgement, he simply didn’t know where to begin and what to do next, and like someone who has for a minute forgotten one part of a sequence of movements, he stood there, staring at the wardrobe door, opening and shutting it again. He opened it and shut it, then returned to his bed so that he might set out for the wardrobe again, and since, at this point, the hopelessness of his situation dawned on him, he tried to concentrate on one thing at a time and decide whether he should choose his dull sky-grey suit or the black one, which was more fitted to such a funereal occasion. He vacillated between the two, choosing now this, now that, but failed to reach any decision about his shirt or tie or shoes or even his hat, and if Valuska hadn’t suddenly begun to rattle about with the lunch-box in the kitchen and startled him with the noise, he would probably have remained in this state of indecision well into the evening and not have realized it was neither the grey nor the black he wanted but a third option, something that might offer him protection out there, a suit of armour ideally. Ideally, he would have preferred to choose not between jackets, waistcoats and overcoats but between helmets, breastplates and greaves, for he was all too aware that the ridiculous humiliation entailed in what he was forced to do — Mrs Eszter turning him into the equivalent of a street cleaner — would be as nothing compared to the potentially fatal real difficulties he would soon encounter; after all, it was about two months since he had last attempted a short walk down to the nearest corner. These difficulties included the moment he first made contact with pavement and air, with all those distances impossible to judge, with the perils he might have to face once he entered on the symbolic dialogue between ‘roof ridges willing themselves to collapse and the suffocating sweetness of starched net curtains’, not to mention what one might call the usual ‘chances one takes in the street’ (complication upon complication!), such as meeting the first, the second, then all the other citizens who were bound to come his way. He had to stand there, steady as a rock, holding his peace, while they mercilessly gave vent to their joy at seeing him again; he had to hold firm while miscellaneous people indulged their legally sanctified lack of restraint and laid the full complement of their psychological problems at his feet, and, worst of all — and here he grew melancholy at the thought — he must remain deaf and blind to all their stifling imbecility in case he should be lured into the truly sickening trap of showing sympathy or commit himself to an act of participation that might prove irreversible, predicaments he had avoided by withdrawing from society and ‘enjoying the well-earned blessings of angelic indifference’. Trusting that his friend-in-need would relieve him of some aspects of his task, he did not concern himself with the manner in which he might go about them: it was of no consequence to him whether he finished up organizing a sewing circle, winning a pot-plant competition or leading this clearly obsessed movement dedicated to sweeping changes, and since he devoted all his energy to resisting such grotesque visions, having finished dressing and taking a last look in the mirror at his impeccable outfit (grey, as it happened), he briefly entertained the faint likelihood of returning from the horrible prospect of his walk unscathed, when his aperçus about the sorry state of the world and his general thoughts, which were far harder to put into words, concerning as they did such subjects as the sparks emitted by the fire in the fireplace and the evanescence of their ‘evil if enigmatic significance’, might be continued precisely where — owing to Mrs Eszter’s foreseeable yet surprising demands — they had so regrettably left off. This was a faint possibility, he thought, but it would call for tremendous exertions in the face of potentially fatal difficulties; and as he passed the ever thinner double row of books in the hall with Valuska in his wake (Valuska was cheerfully dangling the lunch-box by now), and crossed the twilit threshold of the building to reach the street outside, the air he breathed seemed sharp as poison and he grew so dizzy that instead of worrying about ‘being overwhelmed by the tide of middle-class manners’ what really concerned him was whether his legs would support him in the confused and fluid space, and whether it wouldn’t be wiser to consider retreating there and then, ‘before,’ he added as if answering another question, ‘the lungs, the heart, the sinews and muscles could answer for themselves with a resounding no’. It was tempting to go home, lock himself away in the drawing room and insulate himself with cushions and rugs in pleasant warmth, but he couldn’t seriously consider it, since he knew what to expect if he ‘disobeyed orders’: it was equally tempting to bash the monster’s head in. He sought support from his walking stick and his suddenly anxious friend leapt to his assistance (‘There’s nothing wrong, is there, Mr Eszter, sir?’), and eventually he regained his balance and dismissed all thought of resistance from his mind, and concentrated on accepting the dizzy state of the world that was spinning round him as a perfectly natural state of affairs, at which point he took a tight grip of Valuska’s arm and continued on his way. He continued on his way, having decided that Valuska, his guardian angel — either because he was scared of the woman or because he was overjoyed at being able to show him his old haunts — was prepared to haul him through the streets even in his half-dead state, and so, muttering something to allay his fears (‘No, it’s nothing … nothing really’), he kept the true details of his disorientating dizziness and progressive weakening to himself; and while the latter, satisfied that there was nothing to hinder their walk, embarked on an enthusiastic monologue about the dawn birth of that mush of icy mist rolling about them, under whose riveting spell he seemed to have fallen as if for the first time, Eszter, quite beyond the hopes of a few moments ago and truly deaf and blind by now, gave all his attention to keeping his balance, placing one foot in front of another, so that they might at least reach a resting place at the nearest corner. He felt as if he had developed cataracts on both his eyes and was swimming through some foggy void: his ears were ringing, his legs shaking and a hot flush ran through his entire body. ‘I might faint …’ he thought, and rather than fearing such a spectacular loss of consciousness, he actually desired it, for it dawned on him that if he were to collapse in the street, surrounded by a huddle of frightened bystanders, and be carried home on a stretcher, Mrs Eszter’s plan might be ruined and he could escape from the trap by the simplest means possible. Ten more steps, he calculated, might be enough for this fortunate turn of events to take place; to realize that no such turn might be expected took him no more than five. They were passing the higher numbers in Eighteen Forty-Eight Street when, instead of collapsing, he suddenly began to feel better: his legs no longer shook, the ringing in his ears ceased, and, to his greatest annoyance, even the sense of dizziness left him; in other words he had no excuse left for cutting short his walk. He stopped to find he could hear and see once more, and once he saw he was forced to look around and take account of the fact that something had certainly changed since his last excursion into ‘this hopeless bog of a town’. He couldn’t pin down what precisely it was, not at any rate in those first few moments of flickering confusion, but though he couldn’t isolate the phenomenon he had nevertheless to acknowledge that Mrs Harrer’s chattering had not been entirely beside the point. Not entirely beside the point, that was true, but a voice inside him whispered that Mrs Harrer hadn’t quite got the essence of the thing, for, by the time they had taken a breather at the corner of the avenue and the main trunk road, and he had taken ‘proper stock of the matter’, it became apparent to him that, contrary to the opinion of his loyal cleaner, his ‘beloved birthplace’ did not have the look of a town just waiting for the end of the world but rather of one that had survived it. What surprised him was that instead of the usual look of aimless idiocy on the faces of passers-by — an expression of endless patience also adopted by those who peeked from windows in anxious expectation of some great event, in other words ‘the usual dungheap smell of spiritual lethargy’—Wenckheim Avenue and the surrounding streets wore a hitherto unrecognized air of desolation and a look of speechless and arid neglect had replaced the ‘monstrous vacancy’ he was used to. It was strange that while the generally deserted neighbourhood suggested the aftermath of some cataclysmic event, all the incidentals and accidentals of life — contrary to what you would expect in the case of imminent plague or radiation sickness, when everyone would flee in panic — were still in place, looking as permanent as ever. All this was strange and surprising, but what he found most shocking — once he realized it — was that the answer to this conundrum that even a blind man could not help but be aware of and which he himself instinctively and immediately recognized, an instinct which told him that he had entered a terrain that had undergone some scandalous transformation, lay out of his reach despite the fact that as each minute passed he grew ever more convinced that there was an answer, but it was in the form of some hidden clue which even if he could spot — and clearly it had to be visible — he would be unable to recognize: it was something in this gradually more focused image — the silence, the desolate mood, the soulless perfection of the deserted streets — a point of rest on which everything else stood. He leaned with half a shoulder against the wall of the gateway that served as their resting place, gazing at the buildings opposite, taking in the enormity of their voids, their windows and lunettes and the patchwork effect they created as they melted into the spaces between joists, then, while Valuska chattered away, he held his hands against the stucco behind his back in case the crumbling condition of the substance between his fingers might tell him what had happened. His gaze took in the storm-lamps and the pillars covered in advertisements; he observed the bare tops of the chestnut trees and let his eyes run down both ends of the main road, seeking an explanation in terms of distance, size or discrepancy in proportions. But he found no answer there, so he tried to locate an axis that might impose some meaning on the town’s ostensible disorder, looking ever further afield in his effort, until he was forced to admit that it was hopeless searching for a clear overview under a dark sky like this that made early afternoon look like dusk. This sky, Eszter decided, this incomprehensible mass, this complex weight that had settled across them, had not changed its character, not in the slightest detail, and since this suggested that to conceive of even the most minor modulation of its surface was an absolute waste of time he determined to abandon the search and stifle his curiosity, putting the failure of his ‘first instinctive reaction’ down to the erratic functioning of an overstretched nervous system. To hell with it, he decided, acknowledging that he could not count on a favourable resolution to the so-far-steady improvement in his generally lamentable condition, and, as if to underline this, had fixed his ostensibly wandering attention on what Valuska’s ringing words declared to be ‘that eternal herald of good tidings’, the indifferent dome of the sky, when, suddenly, like the proverbial absent-minded professor who discovers his lost glasses at the end of his own nose, he realized that he should not be looking up but down at his feet, since what he was looking for was there, there to the extent that he was standing on it. He was standing on it, had been treading its surface all along, and was fated to proceed along it in the immediate future, and as he noted this, he put his belated recognition of it down to the fact that it was all too obvious, too close, and its unsuspected proximity was the problem; it was because he could touch it, indeed walk all over it, that he had ignored it, and he was furthermore convinced that when, in those first few moments, he had sensed that there was something ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘shockingly revolutionary’ about it, he was far from mistaken. It was not the bare fact that was so astonishing, since, by some tacit agreement, the town — its capacity for civic enthusiasm being strictly limited — regarded every piece of common ground as a kind of no man’s land, with the result that for several years now no one had bothered with the so-called ‘issue’ of road maintenance. It wasn’t even the unusual quality of the tide of the stuff that startled him, but its quantity, which Eszter, unlike the twenty thousand or so pedestrians, including Mrs Harrer, who daily trod the pavements — and had she taken particular notice of it she would certainly not have failed to let him know — considered fantastic beyond his wildest dreams. His ostensible response was a simple, ‘Well, well …’ but he was horrified: it was impossible, you couldn’t throw away, you couldn’t drag here such an enormous volume of it, and, since what he saw far exceeded anything that might have been credibly explained to an individual of normal intelligence, he felt that, taking the scale of this extraordinary and ‘monstrous work of havoc’ into account, he might be justified in risking the opinion that ‘the exclusively human capacity for mind-numbing levels of neglect and indifference was, beyond a doubt, truly limitless’. ‘The amount of it! The sheer amount of it!’ He shook his head and, dropping any pretence of listening to Valuska’s interminable discourse, attempted to take in the extent of this monstrosity, this all-pervading deluge, able at last, for the first time, now, at roughly three o’clock in the afternoon, to give a name to that which had so strangely disorientated him. Rubbish. Everywhere he looked the roads and pavements were covered with a seamless, chinkless armour of detritus and this supernaturally glimmering river of waste, trodden into pulp and frozen into a solid mass by the piercing cold, wound away into the distant twilight greyness. Apple cores, bits of old boots, watch-straps, overcoat buttons, rusted keys, everything, he coolly noted, that man may leave his mark by, was here, though it wasn’t so much this ‘icy museum of pointless existence’ that astonished him (for there was nothing remotely new about the particular range of exhibits), but the way this slippery mass snaking between the houses, like a pale reflection of the sky, illuminated everything with its unearthly, dull, silvery phosphorescence. The awareness of where he was exercised an increasingly sobering effect on him — he had by no means lost his capacity for calm appraisal — and as he continued to appraise, as if from a considerable eminence, the monstrous labyrinth of filth, he grew ever more certain that, since his ‘fellow human beings’ had utterly failed to notice this flawless and monumental embodiment of doom, it was pointless talking about a ‘sense of community’. It was, after all, as if the earth had opened up beneath him, revealing what lay underneath the town, or, and he tapped at the pavement with his stick, as if some terrible putrescent marsh had seeped through the thin layer of asphalt to cover everything. A marsh in a bog, thought Eszter, the essential fundamentum of the place, and standing there for a while in vacant contemplation he suddenly had a vision of the houses, trees, lampposts and advertisement hoardings sinking right through it. Could this, he wondered, be a form of the last judgement? No trumpets, no riders of the apocalypse but mankind swallowed without fuss or ceremony by its own rubbish? ‘Not an altogether surprising end,’ thought Eszter, adjusting his scarf, then, having come to this neat full stop and considering his own investigations at an end, prepared to move off. But, understandably enough, he felt rather uncertain about the sheer idea of stepping from the solid concrete of the gateway to the frozen marsh of the pavement for that solid, static, infernal layer of waste in aspic had the knack of appearing both thick and thin, both substantial and brittle at once: like a pond with one day’s covering of ice, it might crack as soon as you put any weight on it. As a concept, it was thick and unbreakable, the top layer of an infinite mass: as substance though it looked wafer thin, a distinctly hazardous surface incapable of sustaining him; and while he stood there, vacillating between the prospects of moving or remaining, the spirit of loathing and resistance rose up in him once again and he decided that ‘owing to unforeseen circumstances’ he would simplify Mrs Eszter’s prescribed modes of procedure and pass the list she had left him to whoever happened to come along: let them arrange the affairs under his name, affairs that, with the town in this condition, he was wholly unfitted to deal with, let them get on with what remained of organizational matters; as for him, he decided, he should make his way home as quickly as his sanity, the state of his health and the petrified lava of lunar rubbish allowed. Unfortunately there was precious little chance of meeting anyone, the only visible life-form along Béla Wenckheim Avenue being a hardier species of cat, great softly padding packs of them, guarding, in their indolent way, the frozen residue of objects which still held significance for them, but from which, as far as everyone else was concerned, the weight of meaning had been lifted like some unspecified burden. They were overweight creatures, grown visibly feral, born out of a long dream, who, in these favourable circumstances, were clearly reverting to their ancient predatory instincts, witnesses, tsars of a long-expected dark age that seemed as if it would go on for ever, the new lords of a town where ‘as far as he saw, the signs of a progressive and general decadence were all too evident’. No one could doubt that these cats were afraid of nothing, and, right on cue, as if to prove it, an individual beast in one of the packs, one that, judging by the half-rat between its jaws, had clearly not gone hungry, having recognized potential prey in the figures of two members of the former master race in the gateway, was approaching them with an air of insolent audacity. Eszter did not accord any special significance to the cats, but, once he noticed them, made a shooing movement with his hand which was intended to frighten them off, a gesture wasted on the uninhibited rabble that had apparently stuffed itself to the point of nausea; and, since the deference once owing to his species was no longer forthcoming at a mere gesture, its only effect being a cautious minor retreat on the part of the pack, it seemed he would have to resign himself to their company; and so it proved, for, having resolved to move off (and thereby put an end to all that vacillation) and set out in the direction of the cinema and the Komló Hotel, they found that the cats, instead of leaving them alone, ‘as if recognizing, in their instinctive animal way, the change in their relative status’, continued to follow them a good part of the way, at least as far as the hotel where Valuska picked up Eszter’s dinner and stowed it in his lunch-box, at which point, like detectives grown tired of tailing a suspect, they simply gave up and dispersed to forage among the most recent-looking of the piles of rubbish, resorting to their keen primitive sense of smell as they searched for scraps of meat, chicken bones or, indeed, live rats. The whole place looked as if an unruly carnival had not long ago passed that way: dangerous piles of broken glass and shards of bottles of cheap spirits lay before the deserted hotel entrance while, on the other side of the street, a gutted and vandalized bus, which seemed to have collapsed in mid-genuflection about its broken axle, stood with its hood up against Schuster’s haberdashery shop as if someone had given it a vague shove in that direction. Soon enough Valuska rejoined Eszter and they reached the Chez Nous Café, from where, according to Mrs Harrer, the famous poplar tree ought to have been visible (the one which had apparently got so bored with gripping the soil it let go its hold and collapsed, like some harmless giant, across the narrow width of Hétvezér Passage). Eszter, who was undoubtedly still dazed by the general experience of being outside but was thinking only of the rubbish, drew his companion’s attention to it. ‘Tell me, my friend, do you see what I see?’ But it was pointless trying to share his astonishment with him: that was plain the moment he opened his mouth, for, after a moment of confusion (in himself or in the other man?), the merest glance at Valuska’s shining face revealed that, having concluded his account of his dawn reveries, his mind was altogether elsewhere, as indeed it would be, thought Eszter, in one who had spent an eternity wandering the city streets and still did not notice anything unusual in this nightmare landscape — and the beaming expression on the face of his escort on this mournful shuffling walk was perfect demonstration of the fact that he regarded it almost as a kind of negation of the filth underfoot; it was as if the whole occasion were in some way uplifting, and that it was only due to some hallucination, born out of his own weakness and astonishment, that Eszter, having realized his mistake far too late, had stumbled across a ghost town where the old town had been. Ever since they had left the house he had concentrated solely on observing and assessing the situation, had hardly heard what the other man said, and if he had been aware of his presence at all it was merely because their arms were linked; so it was strange that now, suddenly, in understanding everything too late, he saw that there was but one proper target for his attention, that being the figure beside him, the man wearing a cap and a coarse, enormous postman’s cloak, that blissfully meandering conveyor of provisions, Valuska himself. Up to this point — having so far, mistakenly, assumed he was dealing with a doomed but still functioning society — it had not occurred to him that the strictly reliable system of regular lunch-time and early-afternoon ‘angelic visitations’, not to mention his own unalterable daily routine, had, in effect, been organized by Valuska, and that his friend’s strange, yet by now seemingly natural, punctuality might be in some way vulnerable to external circumstances; but now, on this day, a day which might justifiably be regarded as special, here before the Chez Nous Café, for the first time in all their long acquaintanceship, Eszter suddenly became aware of the great risks his companion had been running, albeit unwittingly, and was seized with a terrible anxiety. He saw this ultimate version of the last human environment, and could, at the same moment, for the first time, understand and imagine Valuska’s life, how, without knowing quite where he was or to what threat he might be vulnerable, this innocent, unsuspecting creature, blinded by the starlight of his own internal solar system (‘Like a rare endangered butterfly lost in flight in a burning forest …’), had spent his days and nights roaming through this potentially lethal heap of rubbish, and, having understood this, Eszter could draw but one conclusion, which was that he couldn’t rely on himself alone but required the assistance of his faithful companion, which thought, in turn, led him to decide there and then that, if they ever succeeded in finding their way home again, he would never again let Valuska out of his sight. For decades he had acted in the belief that his intellect and sensibility led him to reject a world whose products were unbearable to either intellect or sensibility, but were always available for criticism by the same, but now, stepping from Hétvezér Passage into the funereal silence of Tanács Street, he was forced to concede that all his clear thinking and stubborn adherence to the principles of so-called ‘sober ratiocination’ counted for nothing, since as long as this town, which he took to be representative of the world, persisted in maintaining its lethal reality, that earthy muddy smell he found such a particularly terrible trial would persist in emanating from it. It was no use struggling; he had to understand that his customary Eszterian mode of wit was of no help to him here, for the phrases he thought of failed abysmally to establish his proud superiority over the world; the meanings of words had faded like the light in a run-down flashlight, the objects words might have referred to had crumbled under the weight of the fifty or so years that had passed and given way to the unlikely trappings of a Grand Guignol stage-set in the face of which every sober word and thought confusingly lost its meaning. With such a world, in which statements employing tropes such as ‘as’ and ‘as if’ had lost their cutting edge; in an empire that was prepared to sweep away, or so he believed, not ignorance or opposition but whatever did not fit there; with such a ‘reality’, as Eszter conceived it with a shudder of disgust and repulsion, he had nothing to do — though at this precise minute it would have been very difficult for him to deny that to enter this labyrinth and then make such mad grandiosely dignified declarations could hardly be regarded as anything but eccentric. However, this did not stop him making them and, on their next stop, at the newsagent’s stall in Tanács Street, the friendly newsvendor misunderstood him and tried to explain, by way of reassurance, that he knew the reason for this ‘strange depopulation’, launching so enthusiastically forth on his explanation that it concentrated Eszter’s mind solely on the task of getting home as soon as his mission had been accomplished, and, should he by good fortune have succeeded in accomplishing that, henceforth staying there. For he had lost all interest in what was happening out here, in what calamity would follow the tide of rubbish, in fact he had lost interest in everything except how someone who had blundered into the arena might seek safer soil ‘before the performance was over’, how he might disappear like ‘a gentle melody in the midst of cacophony’ and be hidden away indoors, secreted where nobody could ever find him; and this thought kept nagging away like some faint persistent recollection that at least one figure representative of him—‘some strangled, orphaned, vaguely poetic sensibility’—had, once upon a time, really, quite physically existed. With half an ear he was listening to Valuska’s rapt account of his experiences of the morning, something about a whale in Kossuth Square that attracted not only the local townsfolk, but (an obvious if forgivable exaggeration) ‘positively hundreds of people from the surrounding countryside’, but, truth to tell, he could cope with only one thought at a time, that being the problem of how long they had to turn the house on the avenue into an impregnable fortress that could withstand whatever chance could throw at it. ‘That’s where everyone is,’ his companion announced, and as they made their way up the main street towards the corner where the Water Board stood (its name had attracted a certain sarcasm in the last few months), he entered ever more feverishly into speculation about how marvellous it would be if, as a fitting climax to their excursion, they could view this once-in-a-lifetime monster together, and indeed Valuska’s description of the circus-owner with his squashed nose and soiled vest, of the hours of waiting by the so-called masses who flooded the market square, the whale’s enormous proportions and all the other fabulous details of the extraordinary creature, far from moderating Eszter’s desire acted rather as coal to the fire, for the whole depressing excursion with its even more important ‘uncanny sense of preparation’ could (and indeed should) scarcely have led to any other climax than this spellbinding monstrosity. If, he thought, and the thought depressed him further, if this monster should actually be in the square, and the enormous crowd and the showman in the vest were not merely a sign of his companion’s desperate attempt to populate the deserted town with the products of his imagination, and the existence of this tremendous spectacle were underwritten by the poster stuck on the walls of the furrier’s shop, a poster on which someone had written with a brush, or rather with a finger dipped in ink, the words: CARNIVAL TONIGHT, then it seemed all the more poignant that the more he looked about him in the surrounding desolation the more everything pointed to the fact that apart from the stray cats they seemed to be the only living creatures about — in so far as, Eszter bitterly observed, such a sweeping generalization as ‘living’ could be made to apply to their own miserable selves. For it was no use denying it, they did look a somewhat strange sight, hanging on to each other as they slowly made their way towards the Water Board offices on the corner in the grinding cold, each step a struggle against the icy wind; more like two blind visitors from an alien planet than like a respectable man with his faithful companion at his side setting out to enthuse the populace about, of all things, a movement for moral rearmament. They had to harmonize two ways of walking, two different speeds, and, indeed, two different kinds of incapacity, for while Eszter’s every step across the suspiciously glimmering surface was taken as if it were his last, each appearing to be a preparation for a gradual but ultimately total cessation of movement, Valuska’s acute desire to increase his own momentum was consistently frustrated, and since Eszter was clearly dependent on him, he was constrained to hide the fact that the body leaning on his left arm was endangering his sense of balance, for while his enthusiasm could in some sense support the spiritual weight of his beloved master, the same was not true of the physical equivalent. One could perhaps sum up the situation by saying that their roles consisted of Valuska pulling and tugging and Eszter acting as an effective brake, or that Valuska was practically running while Eszter was practically standing still, but it would be inappropriate to consider their progress severally, partly because the discrepancy between their strides seemed to be resolved in some combined lurch forward, an uncertain, painful-looking progress, and partly because their clumsy clinging interdependence precluded their being individually identified as Eszter on the one hand and Valuska on the other: in effect they appeared to form a single bizarre figure. And so they advanced in curious unitary fashion, or, as Eszter rather sourly thought of it, ‘like an exhausted gnome, something perfectly at home in this infernal nightmare’, a wandering shade, a demon that had lost its way, one side of whose body was condemned to supporting the other, the left leaning on a stick, the right merrily swinging a lunch-box, and, as they went on, passing the tiny lawn in front of the Water Board and the silent offices of the Employment Insurance Bureau, they encountered three other figures standing in the doorway of the stocking factory’s White Collar Club who had just glimpsed them and appeared to be rooted to the spot, waiting for the dreaded hand of fate, in the shape of this monstrous apparition slowly approaching them, to reach them (the two groups could well have regarded each other as ghosts), until there came the moment of recognition. ‘Three of the bravest there,’ Eszter nudged Valuska, who was still wholly absorbed in the story of the whale, indicating the ash-grey huddle on the other side (sparing him the supplementary, ‘seeing there is no one else around’), then reminded himself of what Mrs Eszter wanted done apropos her ‘movement’ and set off across the road, steeling himself to the first disturbing waves of missionary endeavour, trying to formulate phrases that might infuse the three men facing him — however poorly they seemed to be equipped for the great reawakening — with appropriate fervour. ‘Something has to be done!’ he bellowed once the formal courtesies were done with, and when he had succeeded in freeing his hand from theirs, one of them, the hard-of-hearing Mr Mádai, whose habit it was to scream mercilessly into his victims’ ears to establish ‘an exchange of views’, kept agreeing with him, and while the other two also agreed, it seemed they strongly disagreed on the more thorny question of what precisely it was that had to be done. Blithely ignoring the issue of what it was they had to do something about and recognizing Eszter as the immediate master of the situation, Mr Nadabán, the fat butcher, whose position among the notable and influential burghers of the town was underwritten by the quality of his ‘gentle and refined poetry’, announced that he would like to call the assembly’s attention to the need for solidarity; but Mr Volent, the fanatical general engineer of the boot factory, shook his head and counselled common sense as the natural starting point, a point with which Mr Mádai disagreed, for, gesturing for silence, he leaned towards Eszter once again and, practically busting his vocal cords, proclaimed, ‘Vigilance, vigilance at all costs, is my advice!’ Not one of them, of course, left any doubt that the central concepts—‘vigilance’, ‘common sense’ and ‘solidarity’—were merely first steps along a logical course of reasoning and that they could hardly wait to sally forth on the mission implied by these noble values and Eszter — deeply relieved at having stumbled upon at least ‘three representative species of local idiot’ at the entrance of the stocking factory’s White Collar Club — had little difficulty in anticipating what would happen if the diversity between the views of three proponents so clearly quivering with excitement and raring to go ever became apparent, so, taking a calculated risk and wanting as soon as possible to yield place to the retreating figure of Valuska, he tried to bridle their rising passions by asking them what united them in their opinion (‘As I assume from the bitter tone of your reply’) that the end of the world had genuinely arrived. The question evidently surprised them and for a single moment the three faces with their different agitated expressions were almost as one, not one of them having expected Gyorgy Eszter to understand the situation; for how, after all, should someone whose existence already seemed to be commemorated in some as yet unwritten epitaph like: ‘He illuminated our daily life by bringing his extraordinary musical gifts to bear upon it’; someone who was an idol of the educated public, the subject of a panegyric in verse which included the line ‘the alpha and omega of our dull lives’, composed by one of the present company, Mr Nadabán; someone who, by virtue of being a genius, was, like all geniuses, presumed to be absent-minded, and who, furthermore, had chosen to withdraw from the noise and haste of the world; how should he have known anything of the matter? Clearly there were many good reasons for him to be ignorant of the situation and the three of them fully appreciated their remarkable fortune in having been chosen — out of all the population of this great town — to inform him of the ominous changes in the neighbourhood. And they kept cutting across each other in their haste to do so: the shops were sometimes full, sometimes empty; education and bureaucracy had more or less broken down; there were terrible problems in heating one’s home because of the shortage of coal; chemists had run out of medicine; travelling by bus or car was impossible; and this very morning, they desperately complained, the telephones had gone dead. This more or less summed up the situation. And what’s more! Volent added bitterly; and not just that! Nadabán interjected; and to top it all! bawled Mr Mádai, and to top it all, here comes this circus to wreck our last faint hopes of restoring order, a circus featuring some dreadful vast whale we have allowed into town out of the goodness of our hearts, against which now nothing can be done. Especially since the really strange events of last night, Nadabán dropped his voice; something more sinister than anything so far, Mádai nodded; since this extraordinarily evil-looking company, Volent’s brow wrinkled, arrived in Kossuth Square. Completely ignoring Valuska, who stared at them with a mixture of sadness and confusion, they addressed themselves to Eszter, explaining that it was bound to be some criminal conspiracy, though it was hard to see what it meant, what it was aimed at, or even to establish the basic facts. ‘There are at least five hundred of them!’ they claimed, but went on to say that there were really only two people involved in the company; one moment it was the star item itself that was the most frightening (they had seen it!), the next it seemed to be merely a diversion from the rise of some kind of mob that was only waiting for night to fall before attacking the peaceful populace; one moment the whale had nothing to do with it, the next it was the cause of all the trouble, and when, finally, they claimed that the ‘shady band of brigands’ was already engaged in looting and rapine and standing immobile in the square at the same time, Eszter decided he had had enough and raised his hand to signal that he wanted to speak. He was interrupted before he could start by Volent, who declared that people were frightened; we cannot stand by and twiddle our thumbs, Nadabán interjected; not while they are plotting our doom, Mádai added in his characteristic fashion. There are children here, Nadabán wiped away a tear; and weeping mothers, Mádai trumpeted; and the most precious thing of all, hearth and home, the family, Volent added, his voice trembling with emotion, all under a terrible threat … One could imagine where this chorus of lamentation might have led if the chorus were not interrupted; one could only imagine since no one would ever know, for they found themselves so weighed down by the air of general gloom they had temporarily run out of breath. Eszter seized the initiative and, bearing in mind the wretched state of their nerves and the tortured condition of their souls, announced that there was, he was pleased to say, a solution: the situation may yet be turned to advantage and secured by a powerful sense of commitment. Without further ado he presented them with the essential programme of the movement for A TIDY YARD, AN ORDERLY HOUSE, the central concern of which, he explained as he looked away somewhere in the distance above their heads, spoke for itself, and if his friends would allow him he would assume the role of ‘ombudsman-in-chief for waste’ and ‘general inspector of refuse’, adding only that he did not doubt for a second the success of their mutual collaboration nor the effective organizational powers of the three gentlemen before him. It was as much as he could do to wait while Valuska handed over the programme for action and explained it all in the most exhaustive detail, and once his companion had finished, he turned on his heels and, compressing the whole act of farewell into a single wave of the hand, left them to digest the information for themselves. He was certain that the seed of Mrs Eszter’s generative words had fallen on fertile soil and that there was nothing more for him to do but to wipe the events of the last quarter of an hour from his mind as thoroughly as he could, so that when his audience of three recovered from his abrupt departure and broke into a spontaneous ecstasy of passion, crying, ‘We shall overcome! Wonderful idea! Solidarity! Common sense! Vigilance!’ he would no longer hear it, and so, drawing strength from the slender comfort that, having exercised his powers of patience to absolute breaking point, he had at least finally rid himself of the burden of his task, he returned to his incomplete plans and tried to think as carefully as he could through possible courses of action. He was aware that news of ‘the successful completion of his assignment’ had to reach his wife unconditionally and in good time (‘And in a few minutes’ time it will be four o’clock already!’), otherwise her threats would certainly be carried out, so, putting an end to the efforts of Valuska, who, having been confused by the preceding gabble, was trying to prove to him the groundlessness of his fears about the circus, he announced that, ‘conscious of a job well done’, he was off home now, but — and here he gave Valuska a significant look, one, however, that did not reveal the full extent of his plans — he would first ask him that whenever he finished whatever remained to do in Honvéd Passage he should return immediately. Naturally, Valuska protested that he couldn’t leave him alone in such cold weather, not to mention abandoning ‘the idea of seeing the whale’, so Eszter was forced to go into a little more detail, interrupting himself only to reassure Valuska that everything was perfectly all right and that he’d manage (‘Look, my friend,’ he said, ‘I cannot say I like the inexorable grip of frost, nor, on the other hand, that my existence here represents the tragedy of a tropical temperament condemned to spend eternity in the empire of snow, since as you know there is no snow, nor shall there be ever again, so let’s not even discuss it. Have no doubt, however, that I am capable of making my way back home over the little distance that remains unaided, even in this cold weather. And another thing,’ he added, ‘don’t spend too much time in regretting the brief postponement of the climax of our memorable adventure. I would happily have made the acquaintance of the majestic being, but we must give it up for the time being. It is, I find,’ he smiled at Valuska, ‘always pleasant and entertaining to come upon a creature on one of the points of the evolutionary scale at which I, personally, would gladly have stopped, but this walk has exhausted me and my rendezvous with your whale will, I imagine, wait till tomorrow … ’ His voice no longer had the sharpness it once had and he was aware that the intention of being witty was far more evident than the wit itself, but since there was a latent commitment in what he said, Valuska, albeit somewhat unhappily, accepted his proposition; so the rest of their way together Eszter remained undisturbed and free to plan the occasion of their next meeting. He came to the conclusion that thanks to Mrs Harrer’s destructive passion for cleanliness, apart from the barricading of the gates and the boarding up of the windows, there was little else needed to make the house habitable, and relieved by this thought he fell to speculating as to what ‘life à deux might be like’. With great care and precision he defined Valuska’s place in the magnetic swamp of his house in the space beside the drawing room, as close to his own as possible, and imagined ‘peaceful mornings spent together’ and ‘silent evenings full of harmony’. He could see them now, sitting together in deep tranquillity, brewing up coffee in the afternoons and preparing hot dinner at least twice a week; his friend would launch forth on his astronomical reveries and he would pass his usual deprecatory remarks, and in so doing they would forget the rubbish, the fading props of the world, the very world itself … He noticed (and the consciousness naturally somewhat embarrassed him) that having got so far with his plans he had begun to shed a few sentimental tears, so he quickly looked round again and, casting his mind back to his sufferings, concluded that in view of his weakened condition (‘Being an old man, as indeed I am’) such a show of emotion was, for once, quite forgivable. He took the ice-cold lunch-box from Valuska, made him swear that as soon as his business was finished he would come straight over, and, after a few other minor admonitions, somewhere in the region of Hétvezér Passage, watched him disappear from view.He lost him from view, yet did not lose him, because even though the houses came between them he could still see Eszter, his beloved master, whose one-hour-long excursion had, under Valuska’s intense protection, left such a strong mark on the town that no mass of mere buildings could obscure him. Everything pointed to the fact that he had passed that way, and wherever Valuska looked, the knowledge that he was still near conjured the other’s presence — so much so that after the actual parting he spent a few minutes in a kind of reverie as the effect of this extraordinary event began to fade, slowing the process down and enabling him mentally to escort his master back to the house in Wenckheim Avenue, when he could breathe again and be assured that the walk, Mr Eszter’s unexpected and wonderful foray into the world, ‘though not without its element of sadness’, had nevertheless been conducted to good effect. To have stood beside him as he left the room, to have been present as he took his first few steps in the hall, to have followed him like a shadow knowing what a tremendous advance this was in the much-desired and long-hoped-for healing process, to have watched him proceed from lounge to outside gate was cause for joy and conferred great honour on him as the proud witness of all this activity; on the other hand, simply to regard the excursion as something ‘not without its element of sadness’ now was to fail to convey the full quality of the experience, since his belated recognition of the fact that his elderly friend found every step an ordeal had, even during the walk, rather clouded the delight of being a ‘proud witness’, leaving only a suffocating air of sadness. He had believed that the moment the invalid had risen for the first time and finally left his curtained room heralded a recovery, a resurrection of his appetite for life, but within a few steps he had had to confront the possibility that the afternoon would bring no amelioration but only reveal the true seriousness of his condition, and the frightening likelihood that his public reappearance in the cause of social renewal was not the way back into the world but, more probably, a last farewell and resignation from it, an act of ultimate rejection, and this — for the first time in all their acquaintance — filled Valuska with the deepest anxiety. Feeling ill at the first breath of fresh air was a bad sign, though, since Eszter had hardly ventured from the house for as long as he could remember and certainly not in the last two months, it was not altogether unexpected, but nothing had prepared him to accept the extent of Eszter’s physical deterioration or the sad condition of the town itself, its nervous tension and exhaustion, and his own lack of vigilance left him with a terrible sense of guilt. Guilt for his lack of awareness, for having blinded himself to the truth and vainly hoped-for improvement in the short term; guilt because if any harm had come to his companion on this most trying walk he would have felt entirely to blame; and more than guilt, shame, confusion and the keenest mental torture, that instead of exhibiting a dignified and brilliant intellect to the town he could produce only a feeble old man whose best option, that of going straight back home, had been made unavailable by virtue of the promise he had made to Mrs Eszter. So they had had to go, and, unable to disguise his dependency, Mr Eszter had, without a word, taken him by the arm, and since this was a sign that his dependency was a form of delegation, Valuska had felt that if this was how things stood there was nothing for him to do but to try and divert his friend’s attention, and so he had begun to talk about the news he had been so happy to bring to his attention at two o’clock. He spoke about sunrise, he spoke about the town, about how each and every part of it had woken to a distinct and separate life as the light touched it at dawn, he had talked and kept talking but the words lacked conviction because he himself was hardly paying attention to them. He was forced to look on the world through his friend’s eyes, constantly to follow Eszter’s gaze and realize, ever more helplessly, that whatever his eyes lit on bore witness not to his own liberating convictions but to the latter’s sombre outlook. In the first moments he had believed that, freed from the close confines of his room, it would be the most natural thing for his friend to recover his strength and desire for life, that he might be persuaded to direct his attention ‘to the totality of things, not to specific details’, but by the time they reached the Komló it had become obvious that, once Eszter had laid eyes on them, these details could not be subsumed under ever more hollow-sounding words, so he had decided to keep quiet, his most valuable contribution to the trials and tribulations of their journey being to give support through honest acceptance and dumb assent. But this resolution had come to nothing, and when he left the hotel the words seemed to rush from his lips with, if such a thing were possible, even greater desperation, for standing in the food line he had heard some terrifying news that had thrown him into utter confusion. To be precise, it was not so much the terrifying news conveyed by people in the kitchen to the effect that ‘the crowd in the market square was in fact a criminal gang of vandals’ which, shortly after twelve o’clock, had robbed and would, like hooligans, have wrecked the entire drinks-dispensing facility of the Komló, for this he simply didn’t believe, discounting it as ‘fears produced by the imagination’, one of the depressingly common signs of ‘infectious terrors and anxieties’; what did, however, surprise him as he was carrying the filled lunch-box back to the waiting Eszter was something he had so far entirely failed to notice: the fact that the corridor and the forecourt and the pavement in front of the hotel were indeed covered in shards of broken flasks and bottles which people were forced to negotiate. He had felt confused and answered his companion’s perfectly understandable questions with a momentary show of hesitancy, quickly going on to talk about the whale, and later — the business with Mr Mádai having been successfully concluded — attempting to allay fears associated with the whale, fears that, to tell the truth, he himself now was prey to, for while he was certain that one sober gesture towards the heavens would ensure a rational return to life as he knew it, he was unable to forget what he had heard in the kitchen (particularly the head cook’s remark that, ‘Anyone wandering about the streets at night is risking his life!’). It was clearly a mistake to think that the ‘friendly obliging people’ with whom he had spent hours waiting in front of the circus vehicle that morning were vandals or bandits, but it was the kind of mistake, Valuska reflected, which, if only because the frightening rumours had spread so far, might leave even a man like Mr Nadabán shaking in his boots; it was therefore up to him to clear up this matter immediately, once and for all, and so, as in his imagination he was escorting Mr Eszter home, and had progressed from Városház Street to the market square, his first instinct on arriving in the midst of the still immobile waiting crowd was to pick out an individual and discuss the matter with him, the memory of the head cook’s irresponsible claim mingling and conflicting with his own more optimistic conviction (… one sober gesture … one cool intervention …). He informed the man what was being said about them, that people in town were wont to jump to conclusions; he told him about Mr Eszter’s condition, and stated his conviction that everyone should be acquainted with that great scholar; he confessed his own fears for him, proclaimed that he knew perfectly well where his duty lay, and finally begged to be excused his slight inarticulacy, but, he quickly added, he was already certain, even after these few minutes, that he was talking to a friendly spirit and that he was absolutely sure that his new friend understood him perfectly. The man he addressed made no reply to any of this but simply gave him a long hard stare from head to toe, then, perhaps noticing Valuska’s startled expression, smiled, slapped him on the back, pulled a bottle of cheap spirits from his pocket and offered it to him in amiable fashion. Relieved to see the relaxed smile on the man’s face after the stern silence of the preliminary inspection, Valuska felt he couldn’t properly refuse the offer as a token of goodwill and, striving to put the seal on his new friendship, took the bottle in his stiff fingers, unscrewed the cap, and, in order to win the other man’s confidence and convince him of ‘the spirit of mutual sympathy’ that existed between them, did not merely take a formal sip of the contents but indulged in one great gulp. He immediately paid for his lack of caution, for the poisonously potent liquid sent him into such a terrible fit of coughing he thought he would choke, and a full half-minute later, having recovered and trying with an apologetic smile to beg pardon for his weakness, he found his words drowned out time and again by yet another fit. He was deeply embarrassed and feared that he had ruined his chances of establishing friendly relations with his new acquaintance; indeed, so real and acute was his suffering that, at the height of his agony, he unconsciously gripped the man he was talking to, and this provided a source of mild amusement not only to the latter, but to those standing in the near vicinity. Recovering his breath in the somewhat more relaxed atmosphere, he explained how Mr Eszter, for all his denials, was busy with a great work, and how, if for no other reason than this, he felt it was incumbent on all of them to restore calm in the house in Wenckheim Avenue — then, turning to his new friend, he confessed that this talk had done him considerable good, thanked the man once more for the goodwill that had been extended to his own person and apologized for the fact that he had to go, promising that next time he would explain his reasons (which were ‘interesting, believe me!’). He had to go, and attempted to take his leave, shaking the man’s hand, but the other would not release it (‘Tell me the reason now, I’d like to hear it’), so Valuska was forced to repeat what he had just said. He had to go — he tried to free his hand from the unexpected grip — but he trusted they would meet again soon, and if this was not the case he could be sought at the Peafeffer, at Mr Hagelmayer’s, or — he stared about him uncomprehendingly, not a little frightened — ask anyone at all, since the name János Valuska was known to everybody. He couldn’t imagine what the other man wanted from him or what this tug of war signified, nor why it suddenly ended when his friend abruptly let go of his hand and the assembled hundreds in the square all turned to face the truck with looks of great anxiety. Seizing the opportunity, still shocked by the strange manner of his detaining, he quickly said goodbye and walked into the thick of the crowd, and only once that crowd had swallowed him after a few steps did he look back, when he was struck by the dreadful thought that he had been mistaken, quite stupid, that he had immediately and shamefully to admit to himself that the powerful force employed against him in such a harmless fashion was no cause for suspicion, that even to suspect such was an act of rudeness on his part. What bothered him most was that by unforgivably misinterpreting the well-meant gesture he had left it unreciprocated, the shame he felt on account of his boorish behaviour being mitigated to some degree only by the knowledge that he was capable of responding to it in more sober fashion very soon after. He really didn’t understand what he had just done (the other man’s patience and sympathy merited gratitude not an irrational panic) and so — his mission to Mrs Eszter not allowing him the time to clear the matter up immediately by seeking out the man in the crowd again — he firmly determined, though he took some time to arrive at a clear explanation for the universal attentiveness, that he would most certainly make amends for his error the next time they met. It was quite dark by this time, only the streetlamps were flickering and some light was filtering through the circus back door, and since the director was not there but at the front of the wagon, only his bare faint silhouette could be picked out. ‘It’s him!’ Valuska stopped dead in his tracks; it was undoubtedly him, even in shadow form his unmistakable great girth gave him away, the often remarked extraordinary extent of him, and indeed the fact of him corresponded in every detail to the rumour. Forgetting his urgent mission for a moment, forgetting all that had just happened, Valuska wormed his way through the crowd, which had clearly grown more agitated since the director’s appearance, in order to get a better look at him, then, once he was close enough, stood on tiptoe in his curiosity and held his breath so as not to miss a single word. The director was holding a cigar between his fingers and was wearing a full-length fur coat, and this, taken together with his gigantic belly, the unusually wide brim of his hat and the vast row of chins collapsing over his carefully tied silk scarf, immediately earned Valuska’s deepest respect. At the same time it was obvious that the awe in which he was held in every part of the square was not due simply to his imposing size, but also to the fact — a fact that no one could forget, not even for a minute — that he was the proprietor of the centre of attention. The otherworldly character of his exhibit lent a peculiar weight to his person, and Valuska gazed at him as if he himself were an extraordinary sight, a man who exercised calm control over that which others looked on in fear and wonder. With the cigar that he was now holding stiffly at some distance he was clearly in absolute command of all he surveyed, and, strange as it may sound, it was impossible to watch anything but that fat cigar in Kossuth Square, for it seemed to belong to someone who, wherever he went, would stand in the shadow of a whale that was the wonder of the world. He looked tired, exhausted even, but it was as if this were the specific thing that had exhausted him, not ordinary everyday matters but one single all-consuming care; it was obviously a fatigue born out of decades of vigilance, exhaustion owing to the knowledge that any moment he might be killed by that immeasurable weight of fat. He said nothing for some time, probably waiting for perfect silence, then, once you could have heard a pin drop, he glanced round him and relit the dead cigar. As he screwed up his face against the rising smoke, taking the whole crowd in through those narrow rodent eyes of his, his expression completely threw Valuska, for this face, that look, though there can have been no more than three or four yards between them, appeared to be situated at some enormous distance from him. ‘Well then,’ he pronounced at long last, but in a manner that suggested that he had already finished speaking, or that he was preparing them for the fact that he was not about to make a great speech. ‘The show is over for the day,’ his deep voice rang out. ‘Until the ticket office reopens tomorrow we wish everyone well and are sincerely grateful for your attention. Allow me to commend our company to you once again. You have been a marvellous audience, but we must now take our leave.’ Holding his cigar away from him as before, slowly, and with some difficulty, he retreated into the crowd that obediently made way for him, climbed up on to the wagon and disappeared from view. He had said only a few words but Valuska felt they were ample proof of the director’s rare eloquence and the uniqueness of the circus (… ‘that a director should take such a fond farewell from his audience …!’), furthermore, from the crescendo of murmuring that immediately followed he concluded — a little frightened perhaps — that he was not alone in appreciating such a marvel. Immediately, that is to say, because the rumble grew louder as it passed across the square, and as it did so he wished the director would return to offer a few commonplace explicatory remarks on the fantastic monster or about the company itself so as to lighten the air of mystery that had gathered about them. He stood there in the dark, not comprehending what people around him were saying, nervously adjusting the strap of his bag on his shoulder, waiting for the commotion, because that was what it had become, to stop. He suddenly remembered the head cook’s words and the conversation in front of the White Collar Club, and since the sounds of dissatisfaction had still not abated, he had a momentary intimation that the apparently needless fears of the local population might not be so needless after all. He couldn’t, however, afford to wait until the rumblings of disappointment died away, nor for the reasons for it to become apparent; unfortunately he had to leave without properly understanding it. Even after having pushed his way through the crowd to the opening of Honvéd Square he couldn’t quite understand it. And in any case … along the pavement on the way to Mrs Eszter’s dwelling … walking down those empty streets … his mind grew a little confused, one or other of the day’s events flashing before him, and he couldn’t see the meaning of any of them. On the one hand, memories of the day’s excursion with Mr Eszter filled him with sadness; thoughts of the town and the square, on the other, caused him to suffer acute pangs of guilt for having wasted his time: he alternated so rapidly between these two states of mind, both conditions so remote from his usual experience (being cast into other people’s lives, as it were, rather than marooned in his own), that he was utterly disorientated by the dizzying succession of images to the extent that nothing remained in his mind except indecision and incomprehension and an ever more desperate desire to ignore both indecision and incomprehension. On top of that, opening the garden gate he felt an all-surpassing terror sweep over him as he realized that it was long past four o’clock and that Mrs Eszter, with her implacable nature, would certainly not forgive him. But forgive him she did — not only that but it looked as if the presence of guests had diminished the importance of his mission, since she seemed hardly to be listening to his account, simply nodding irritably, leaving Valuska standing at the threshold, preparing to give details of the successful commencement of their campaign then forestalling him by announcing that ‘in view of the current serious circumstances, the whole matter had, for the moment, lost its importance’, then pointing to a stool and indicating strictly that he should remain silent. It was only then that Valuska realized he had mistimed his arrival and that there was some possibly vital conference in progress, and as he didn’t understand his role in all this, nor why the woman — her business with him being over — did not simply send him away, he sat down and clutched his knees tightly, fearful of making the slightest sound. If this was really the case and he had in fact blundered into an important meeting the committee certainly presented a strange spectacle. The mayor was dashing about the room, shaking his head in the most grief-stricken manner, then, having taken two or three such turns about the room, cried out (‘To have come to this, that a leading official should have to lurk in the bushes in people’s gardens …!!’) and, purple with rage, first tightened then loosened the knot of his tie. There was not much you could say about the chief of police since he was lying, red-faced, a damp handkerchief spread across his forehead, wearing his uniform overcoat, perfectly immobile and staring stiffly at the ceiling, on the bed, which exuded a strong stench of alcohol. But it was Mrs Ezter herself who was behaving the most strangely for she wasn’t saying anything but was obviously lost in deep thought (she kept biting her lips), now glancing at her watch, now looking significantly in the direction of the door. Valuska was overawed and sat in his place, and though, if for no other reason than his obligation to Mr Eszter, he should certainly have gone, he did not dare move a muscle in case he disturbed the tense proceedings. However, nothing happened for a long time and the mayor must have covered a good furlong walking up and down, when Mrs Eszter stood up, cleared her throat and announced that, since there was no point in waiting any longer, she had a valuable suggestion to make. ‘We should send him,’ she said, pointing to Valuska, ‘so that, while we are waiting for Harrer to arrive, we should have a clear view of the situation.’ ‘The difficult situation! The difficult situation, if you please!’ the mayor cut in, stopping dead in his tracks, with a most bitter expression, then, shaking his head again, he said he doubted that ‘this otherwise commendable young man’ was up to the task. She, however (‘I, however …!’), did not and gave him a brief, superior smile that did not invite dissent, then, turning to Valuska with the utmost solemnity, Mrs Eszter explained to him that all that was required of him was that he should go to Kossuth Square and, ‘in the interest of us all’, should carefully observe what was happening there and bring report of it back to ‘this crisis committee, in the simplest possible terms’. ‘Delighted to oblige!’ Valuska rose from his stool, having immediately understood that ‘the interest of us all’ concerned his friend, and that was why the committee had met, then, uncertainly, not knowing whether he was doing the right thing, stood to attention and announced that he was all the more prepared to offer his services since Kossuth Square was where he had just come from, and he felt obliged to clarify a point or two, specifically relating to the strange mood of the crowd. ‘Strange mood?!’ The chief of police sat up for a moment on hearing this, then collapsed back on to the bed. In a faint voice he asked Mrs Eszter to dampen the handkerchief on his brow again and to bring him paper and pencil so that he should be able to make proper notes, since he could see that this was a matter that bore heavily on his official duties as a policeman and that he should ‘assume command of the situation’. The woman looked at the mayor and he looked back at her in quiet agreement that — the invalid being supplied with another damp handkerchief in the meantime — it would be ‘best to preserve calm’, so they beckoned Valuska over and Mrs Eszter sat down beside the bed, paper and pencil in her hand. ‘So little time!’ the chief sighed in anguish, and when the woman retorted, ‘There’s enough,’ a wave of anger ran over him and, in a condescending manner, like a professional among amateurs, he asked methodically, ‘More-of-what?’ ‘Enough time, enough place. I’ve written it all down,’ Mrs Eszter responded, irritated. ‘I was asking him,’ the chief nodded bitterly in the direction of Valuska, ‘What time? What place? Where? When? Note down his answer, not mine.’ The woman turned her head away in fury, clearly in a state of extraordinary tension, unwilling to say a word for the moment, then, recovering a little, she gave the perpetually moving mayor a meaningful look then glanced over to Valuska and gestured that he should ‘simply get on with it’. Valuska shifted from foot to foot, not understanding what precisely he was being expected to do, and, afraid that the invalid’s anger might at any moment be turned against him, attempted to inform the company ‘in the simplest possible terms’ of what he had seen in the square, but after a few sentences, when he reached the part about his new acquaintance, he felt he had made a mistake, and indeed the others stopped him there. ‘Don’t go rattling on about about your impressions, what you thought or heard or imagined,’ the chief cast his melancholy red-eyes at him, ‘stick to objective facts! The colour of his eyes …? How old he was …? How tall …? Outstanding characteristics …? I won’t even bother,’ he waved in resignation, ‘to ask you for his mother’s name.’ Valuska was forced to confess that he was indeed rather uncertain about precise data of that kind, excusing himself with the plea that it was getting dark just at that time, and though he announced that he would gather all his wits and concentrate harder in case he should remember anything else, however he tried even his friend’s image seemed to consist of nothing but a hat and a grey overcoat. To general relief, but particularly his, the invalid was at that point overtaken by the healing powers of sleep, so the volley of ever more dissatisfied and ever more difficult questions came to a sudden end, and since the pedantic and impersonal level of enquiry to which he felt unequal was clearly no longer to be enforced, despite his anxiety he succeeded in concluding his account and clearing things up a little. He described the appearance of the director from the cigar through to the elegant fur coat and repeated his memorable words of farewell; he described the circumstances of the man’s departure and how this was received by the crowd; and, since he was convinced that the committee before him would interpret the foregoing events in this light, he admitted that, owing to the conditions in the market square and the town generally, he was quite at a loss what to do as far as Mr Eszter was concerned. If this outstanding scholar were to recover his health and retain his powers of creation, he needed, above all, conditions of absolute calm, calm, repeated Valuska, and not that ever more intense, and to him wholly incomprehensible, sense of agitation he had unavoidably (‘though I did everything I could to avoid it …!’) encountered this afternoon on finally leaving his house. Everyone knew that for a man blessed with such a high degree of sensitivity even the most insignificant signs of disorder were likely to be harmful and depressing, and because of this, Valuska confessed, especially because he had seen how the universal anxiety had communicated itself to the crowd in the market square, his every thought was for Mr Eszter. He understood perfectly that his own role and significance in the business in hand, compared to that of Mrs Eszter and the committee, amounted to little short of nothing, nevertheless he begged them to place their trust in him, to be assured that they could rely on him to do whatever they demanded of him. He would have liked to add that for him personally Mr Eszter’s good was of paramount importance, and, having got so far, to state how greatly he himself was reassured by the fact that the fate of the town (and therefore of his master) was in the hands of something as impressive as the committee he saw before him, but unfortunately he was unable to express either sentiment, for the woman silenced him with a single stern gesture, saying, ‘Very good, indeed you are perfectly right, we can’t sit round chattering, we must do something.’ They made him repeat what he was to do, and he, excitedly, like a child reciting his tables, went through all the salient points — which were to note ‘the size of the crowd … the atmosphere … and the appearance, should it appear, of a certain monster’; then, once they had given up the idea of explaining this last admonition and made him solemnly promise to be both thorough and quick, he promised to return in a matter of minutes and left the committee room on tiptoe lest he should wake the occupant of the bed, who, just at that moment, groaned in his sleep. Wholly immersing himself in the dignity of having been trusted by the committee, or rather in the sense of relief that an entire ‘crisis committee’ was supporting Mr Eszter through his trials and tribulations, he carried on tiptoeing through the courtyard and only remembered to assume his normal gait once he had reached the street and closed the rickety old gate behind him. He couldn’t positively state that the visit to Mrs Eszter was exactly reassuring but at least the woman’s decisiveness had exercised a healing power which drove away anxiety and uncertainty, and though he hadn’t received an answer to any of his questions, he felt that here, at last, was someone to whom he could safely entrust his affairs. Unlike the earlier situation, where he — the unworldly innocent — had to understand and decide things by himself, he was now entrusted with a single unambiguous task, to accomplish that which he had been asked to do, and this wouldn’t, after all, be so terribly difficult, he thought. He mentally ran through the various elements of that task — ten times at least — and, before long, felt lighter in his mind concerning the matter of the unspecified ‘monster’ (having worked out that he was supposed to be looking at the whale again); he felt lighter, and, remembering the calm gaze of the woman, felt the once-disturbing fog of confusion concerning his entire mission lifting at the same time, and so, when he practically collided with Mr Harrer at the entrance to the square, the latter having addressed him in passing (‘Everything will be all right now, but it would be much better if a young man like you were not hanging about in the street …!’), he simply smiled back and vanished into the multitude though he would have been all too happy to explain his presence (‘… no, you’re mistaken, Mr Harrer, this is precisely where I should be …!’). The square was now lit by hundreds of little fires, and here and there groups of twenty or thirty freezing bodies were warming themselves at the flames, which leapt higher and higher, and since this made it easier to pass through them and to see everything a little more clearly, it took Valuska only a few unobstructed minutes to take stock of the scene before him. A few minutes without obstruction perhaps, but this ‘thorough examination’ brought no immediate enlightenment as to the sheer size of the crowd (what detail was he supposed to look out for if everything was as before?) and observing these apparently peaceful groups loitering about the fires, rubbing their hands, he felt there was nothing particularly threatening here, not even in ‘the atmosphere’. ‘No one is moving, the mood seems fine,’ he tried the words out, but they rang ever more false, and as they did so, the nature of his mission appeared ever more painful. Observing these people in secret, walking among them as if he were some enemy, suspecting them of unnamed felonies and murders, taking their most innocent gestures as evidence of an evil intent — Valuska immediately realized that he was incapable of carrying this programme through. If, in his previous state of fright, he had found the woman’s sobering power a source of strength, then a few minutes among these people gathered around the friendly warmth of bonfires — resulting in a curious and sudden sense of domesticity — relieved him of the minor but embarrassing burden of misunderstanding, a misunderstanding shared by the head cook, Nadabán and his friends and Mrs Eszter herself, implying that the cure for ‘anxiety induced by a need for a rational explanation’ (and indeed his anxiety concerning Mr Eszter too) might be found in the circus and its long-suffering audience. The undoubtedly mysterious circus and the mysteriously loyal audience, the entire mystery, Valuska admitted to himself as the vision grew clearer, might have a simple and perfectly obvious explanation. He joined a group by one of the fires but the silence of his companions as they hung their heads staring at the flames or occasionally stole a glance in the direction of the circus wagon no longer perturbed him because he clearly understood that the mystery consisted of nothing but the whale, the first sight of the whale that he himself had seen and experienced that very morning. Was it so strange, he thought as he gazed about him with a smile on his face — and he would happily have hugged every single one of them in his relief — that everyone here had been as captivated as he was by the extraordinary creature? Was it any wonder that, deep down inside themselves, they believed it might be worth waiting on some extraordinary event in its proximity? He was so delighted to feel ‘the scales falling from his eyes’, he wanted to share the experience, and therefore declared in conspiratorial tones to those around him that he found ‘the endless wealth of nature’ overwhelming, quite overwhelming, he said, adding that such a sign, on a day like this, pointed to ‘the apparently lost unity of things’—then, not waiting for a reply, he waved goodbye to the others and continued on his way among the crowd. His first impulse was to rush back with the news, but according to his instructions he was to survey the whale too (‘The monster …!’ he smiled at the fearful epithet), and so, in order that his account to the committee should be as full as possible, he determined to steal another quick glance at ‘the Emissary of the One’ if he could, and not to leave his companions in the lurch this evening, an evening that had begun so badly but now promised to end so well. The wagon was open and they hadn’t yet put the boards across, so he couldn’t resist the possibility of stepping in rather than simply having a ‘quick peek’. Now that he was alone in looking at it, the body of the whale, illuminated by only two flickering light bulbs and resting as it did between enormous tin walls in the freezing cold outside, appeared bigger and more terrifying than ever, but he was no longer scared of it, in fact, apart from a respectful fascination, he felt as if the intervening events between their first encounter and the present one had facilitated a strange, confidential, almost courteous relationship between the two of them, and he was about to give it a humorous ticking off as he was leaving (‘See how much trouble you’ve caused, even though you’ve long been unable to harm anyone …’) when he heard unexpected if indistinct voices somewhere deep in the wagon. He thought he recognized the voices, and, as it soon turned out, he was not mistaken, for having reached the door at the back which, as he had earlier surmised, led to the area reserved for accommodation, by putting his ear to the tin wall he could begin to pick out a few sentences (‘… I engaged him to show himself, not to spin stupid stories. I won’t let him out. Turn him round! …) that were most certainly spoken by the director. The sounds he heard after that — a low even grumbling followed by a kind of sharp and sudden chirrup — were perfectly incomprehensible at first and it took some time for him to realize that the director was not conducting a monologue with caged birds and bears but was expressly addressing someone, that the strange grumblings and chirrupings must in fact have been produced by human beings, the first of which was even now grumbling in rather broken Hungarian to the effect that, ‘That’s what he says, and no one can stop him whatever they do. And he doesn’t understand what you are saying, Mr Director, sir …’ Having got so far, it was clear to Valuska that he had found himself in the position of uninvited witness (furthermore, one ever less capable of suppressing his curiosity) to a discussion or, more likely, argument, though what the subject of the argument was, or whom the director was addressing in that apparently tense atmosphere (Tell him,’ he was just saying, ‘I am not willing to risk the reputation of the company again. That last time was positively the last …’), was not quite clear, and even if he did succeed in distinguishing the new bout of grumbling from the concomitant chirruping, and interpreting the bit of vaguely Hungarian grumbling that followed (‘He says he doesn’t recognize a superior authority. And that the director couldn’t seriously think he would …’), he still couldn’t tell who was speaking or how many conspirators there were in that hidden room, at least not until the next snatch of conversation. ‘Would you please get it through into that infant’s thick skull,’ the director exclaimed, losing his temper — and being able to smell his cigar Valuska could picture the smoke snaking from his lips—‘that I will not let him out, and even if, God knows, I did let him out he couldn’t say a word. And you would not act as his interpreter. You are to remain here. I will take him out. Otherwise he’s fired. In fact you’re both fired.’ Recognizing the unmistakably threatening tone of that remark it suddenly dawned on Valuska not only that this grumbling and chirruping — which were once again succeeding each other in that order and which reminded him of nothing he had ever heard before — were linguistically related and that there must therefore be two other people in that, as he imagined, narrow if not altogether uncomfortable bedroom (the director’s person had radiated a likely need for comfort) beside the man with the sonorous and commanding voice, but that one of the two, the grumbler, must be the ticket collector with the squashed nose he had seen that morning. The very name he seemed to be stuck with, the ‘factotum’, made this all the more likely, and once he had decided this, one actor in this increasingly terrifying though enlightening conversation — which was clearly of an intimate or, so to speak, business nature — one particular member of this, as all the circumstances appeared to suggest, two-person company (something told Valuska that he had stumbled on the place where all his questions would be answered once the subject of the conversation was revealed, as it soon would be) became practically visible, and he could imagine him as clearly as if he were standing there, watching that enormous body behind the tin door as it calmly mediated between the two passionately opposing parties, between a strange and apparently inarticulate language and the language of the director. What that language was, who it was the factotum was acting as interpreter for — in other words, working out who the third person in that sealed domestic space was — lay, for now, beyond Valuska’s capabilities to discover, since neither the response (which in the giant’s grumbling translation came out as, ‘He says he’s wants me with him because he’s afraid the director might drop him’) nor the cigar smoker’s sharp interjection (‘Tell him I resent his impudence!’) was of any great help. Not only did it not help but it further confused him, since the suggestion that this so far unseen member of the whale’s entourage (not just unseen, but apparently, deliberately concealed) had to be carried (how, on one’s lap?), and that he had been hired as an exhibit which was not going to be put on exhibition, made the problem a particularly hard one to solve in any convincing way; furthermore, the imperious reaction (‘He says that is ridiculous, because it’s common knowledge he has a following out there. His followers will not forget who he is. No ordinary force can hold him, he has a magnetic power’) indicated ever more clearly that the awe-inspiring and apparently omnipotent director was in a very tight corner, faced as he was by a superior being. ‘Sheer insolence!’ the director cried, openly betraying his dependency and helplessness, and the ever more nervous witness behind the door felt a tremor pass through him, thinking that if nothing else then the terrifying power of this great booming voice must surely put an end to the argument. ‘His magnetic power,’ the voice rumbled mockingly, ‘is a disfigurement! He is an aberration, I’ll say it slowly so you can understand it, an ab-ber-ray-shun, who — and he knows this as well as I do — has no knowledge or power. The title of prince,’ the voice rang with contempt, ‘was one I bestowed on him as a business decision! Tell him that I invented him! And that out of the two of us, I alone have the faintest conception of the world about which he piles lie upon outrageous lie, whose mob he agitates!!’ ‘He says his public is out there waiting,’ came the answer, ‘and they are growing impatient. To them he is The Prince’. ‘All right,’ screamed the director, ‘he is fired!!!’ Though through this exchange, which — because of the mystery surrounding the actors and the subject of their argument — was frightening enough in itself, Valuska had all but turned to stone behind the tin partition, it was only now that terror really seized him. He felt that those imposing words from ‘aberration’ through to ‘agitates’, from ‘magnetic power’ through to ‘mob’, were sweeping him towards some ominous shore where everything he had failed to understand these last few hours, in fact every apparently meaningless phenomenon of the last few months, would suddenly resolve itself into a single picture with one dreadful outline, putting an end to ignorant certainties (such as the belief that the broken glass on the floors of the Komló, the friendly hand that seemed to manacle him in its grip, the anxious conference in Honvéd Square, and the patient waiting of the crowd in the market square had, and could have, nothing to do with each other), and that because of these ‘imposing words’ the blurred image created in his mind by the sum of his confused impressions and experiences had, like a landscape from which the fog had started to lift, begun the irreversible process of clearing, thereby suggesting the possibility that all these phenomena were symptoms of, or pointed to, a single event that meant ‘big trouble’. At this stage of hostilities it was too early to say what precisely that might be, but he suspected that even if he were to offer resistance, he would know soon enough; and he did resist it as though it were possible to place obstacles in its path, and defended himself as if this offered some hope of avoiding it, of suppressing the instinct which up till now had detected no obvious connection between the crowds that had arrived together with the circus and the local people’s hysterical sense of foreboding. That hope, however, was growing fainter by the minute, for the director’s furious outburst had drawn together the various strands of his experience so far, from the head cook’s words to the depressing conviction of Nadabán and his friends, from the memorable unrest of the crowd stiff with cold to the possibilities suggested by the so-called ‘monster’, and this consonance suggested something terrifying, if only because he was forced to admit that when he had dismissed, and indeed smiled at, local people’s apprehensions, apprehensions that seemed to have grown particularly acute in the last twenty-four hours, they were right and he was wrong. From the moment the thought had first occurred to him during the murmur of protest following the director’s notable public address, Valuska had successfully avoided drawing the appropriate conclusions and had dismissed any possibility that all the available facts supported the dark forebodings of the locals; through the time in Honvéd Square when he recognized that somewhere at the back of his own anxieties about Mr Eszter there lurked the suspicion that the general apprehension ‘had taken hold of him too on the way’, down to the present moment when he had lost even the capacity to move away from the door, he was forced to recognize that the relaxation of tension that used to follow waves of fear would not now occur, that the shadow of significance that underlay these phenomena ultimately was their true significance, that there would, in short, be no escape from the feeling of inevitability about what was happening here. ‘Fine, he says,’ so the battle beyond the door continued. ‘He’ll go freelance from now. He will part company from the director and take no further interest in the whale. And he’s taking me with him.’ ‘You?!’ ‘I’ll go,’ answered the factotum indifferently, ‘when he says so. He means money. The director is poor. To the director The Prince means money.’ ‘Don’t you give me that Prince stuff too!’ the director turned on the interpreter, then, after a moment, he added: ‘Tell him I don’t like arguing. I’ll let him out on one small condition. That he keeps his mouth shut. Not a word. He is to be as silent as the grave.’ The weary tone of that voice, the early thunder of which had been reduced to a groan of resignation, left him in no doubt that the director had suffered a defeat, and since Valuska knew the cause in which he had been defeated and understood that there was something about the maker of that chirruping sound that the out-manoeuvred master was wanting, at all costs, to frustrate, something that would now inevitably follow with an instant and blinding clarity, he felt very much like a cat stuck in the middle of the road, paralysed by the headlights of an onrushing vehicle: he couldn’t move a muscle but stared, numb and helpless, at the inner door of the freezing truck. ‘He says,’ the voice of the interpreter continued, ‘there will be no conditions. The director gets the money, The Prince gets his followers. Everything has a price. There’s no point in arguing.’ ‘If his rabble destroy the towns they pass through,’ the director argued, exhausted, ‘there will be nowhere left for him to go after a while. Translate that.’ ‘He says,’ came the immediate answer, ‘that he has no wish to go anywhere at any time. It is always the director who carries him. And, he says, he doesn’t understand what you mean “after a while”. There’s no time left even now. Unlike the director, he believes that everything has its own individual significance. The significance is in the elements not in the whole as the director imagines.’ ‘I don’t imagine anything,’ the director answered after a long silence. ‘What I do know is that if he rouses the crowd rather than calming it, they will tear this town to pieces.’ ‘A town built on lies will continue to be a town built on lies,’ the factotum spoke for the more agitated chirruping. ‘What they do and what they will do are both based on lies and false pride. What they think and what they will think are equally ridiculous. They think because they are frightened. Fear is ignorance. He says he likes it when things fall to pieces. Ruin comprises every form of making: lies and false pride are like oxygen in the ice. Making is half: ruin is everything. The director is frightened and doesn’t understand: his followers are not frightened and do understand.’ ‘Please inform him,’ the director snapped back, ‘that as far as I am concerned his prophecies are mere blather, he can sell them to the mob but not to me. And tell him, while you’re at it, that I refuse to listen to him any longer, that I will have nothing more to do with him, will take no responsibility for his actions, and that from this moment, gentlemen, you are free to do as you please … If you ask me though,’ he added, clearing his throat for emphasis, ‘you would do better to tuck your princeling up in bed, give him a double dose of cream, then take your books out and learn to speak Hungarian properly.’ ‘The Prince is shouting,’ the factotum remarked indifferently above the now continuous, almost hysterical chirruping, not even bothering to address his boss directly. ‘He says, he is always free in himself. His position is between things. And in between things he sees that he is himself the sum of things. And what things add up to is ruin, nothing but ruin. To his followers he is “The Prince” but in his own view he is the prince of princes. Only he can see the whole, he says, because he can see there is no whole. And for The Prince this is how things must be … as they must always be … he must see with his own eyes. His followers will wreak havoc because they understand his vision perfectly. His followers understand that all things are false pride, but don’t know why. The Prince knows: it is because the whole does not exist. The director cannot grasp this, the director is in his way. The Prince is bored with him; he is going out.’ The passionate chirruping ceased along with the bear-like grumbling, nor did the director have anything more to say, but even if he had Valuska wouldn’t have heard it, because ever since those last words died away he had been backing away, much as his ears were — metaphorically — backing away from the words, in fact he backed away so far that he bumped into the propped-up snout of the whale. Then somehow everything around him was in motion: the truck slipped from under him, people were running beside him, and this great sense of rushing stopped only when he realized, in the middle of the crowd, that his new friend — to whom he wanted to reveal that what they were going to be asked to undertake was dreadful and that the words they were waiting to hear, even if they were what they had been waiting for all this time, should under no circumstances be listened to — was nowhere to be found. Was nowhere to be found because the immense burden of his discovery had suddenly descended on him, crushing and destroying in minutes every idea he had formed about the circus, the afternoon and everything else that had happened to him that day, because his head was spinning, his shoulders were aching and he was cold and could no longer see faces but merely the blurred shapes of bodies. He ran between the bonfires but, being racked with cramps, his words (‘deception’ … ‘evil’ … ‘shame’) came out in such a breathless and choking manner as to be practically incomprehensible; incapable of helping himself he persisted in trying to help others, a doomed enterprise, for while he was aware that the sum of his knowledge — after an initial period of ignorance and credulity — had suddenly equalled and exceeded theirs, he also knew that the mere existence of The Prince guaranteed that whatever he wanted to do, there was nothing to be done. ‘There’s something terrible going on,’ he wanted to say but couldn’t get the words out and was quite incapable of deciding where to go with this information. Mr Eszter was his first thought and he set off towards the avenue, but suddenly changed his mind and turned back, only to stop a few yards later as if realizing that his first course was, after all, the wisest. And though events had slowed down to this point, suddenly everything began rushing once more: the lights of the bonfires were spinning round him, people were running again, and even while trying to avoid them he noticed that a curious silence had descended on the square; he couldn’t hear anything except his own hectic breathing, which rose loudly and powerfully from inside him: it was like leaning close to a millwheel in motion. He found himself in Honvéd Square and the next moment he was knocking on the woman’s door, but however often he repeated it to himself before entering, however often he actually pronounced the words (‘There’s something terrible going on, Mrs Eszter! Mrs Eszter, there’s something terrible going on out there!’) he failed to attract the attention of either the hostess or her guests. They didn’t seem to understand him. ‘It was the so-called monster, wasn’t it? It frightened you, is that right?’ the woman asked him with a self-confident smile, and when he nodded back at her, wide-eyed with panic, she simply sighed, ‘Not surprising. Not surprising!’ her confident smile readily giving way to a more troubled look, and having led the vaguely protesting Valuska to the one unoccupied stool and pushed him forcefully on to it, she attempted to calm him by telling him how ‘even our little circle of friends here was not exactly immune to anxiety until Mr Harrer finally appeared with his good news’, and that meant that Valuska could relieve his mind somewhat for (‘Thank God!’) it was certain that the troublesome company would be leaving town within the hour, whale and prince and all. But Valuska shook his head vehemently, leapt from his seat and repeated the sentence that had been ringing in his head all this time, then attempted as best he could to explain ‘as clearly as possible’ how he had inadvertently been witness to an intense argument which proved without the shadow of a doubt that The Prince was not about to leave. ‘Things had moved on,’ said the woman, pushing the rather unwilling Valuska back on to his seat, and leaning on his shoulder with her left hand so as to improve his perception of matters — she understood why the mere presence of the criminal referred to as The Prince should have so discomposed him, it was because, ‘If I am not mistaken,’ she added softly with a superior smile, ‘you have really only just grasped the core of the problem.’ She understood perfectly, their indomitable hostess continued, raising her voice so everyone should hear her (Valuska was unable to move for the weight of her hand on his shoulder); she understood and, since she too had had the same experience, it was no mystery to her what a person might feel when confronted with the true nature of the masked circus freak for the first time. ‘Only half an hour ago,’ Mrs Eszter’s roar rang through the small room, ‘we were given every reason to believe that the plans of this creature, this renegade hireling of the circus management, or as the unimpeachable director himself put it, in Mr Harrer’s report, this “viper in our bosom”, would be realized and there was nothing anyone could do about it, and at that point we had every reason to think it was so, but now, equally, we have every reason to believe the opposite, for since then the management, newly aware of its responsibilities, has decided on a course of effective intervention and will shortly free us of this demonic presence. Thanks to Mr Harrer’s good offices,’ Mrs Eszter continued passionately, almost transfigured, her words not really aimed at the company, but at reinforcing the idea of her own unquestionable significance, ‘we know what lurks behind the mystery of what we may boldly admit is the mortally frightening rag-bag horde that threatens us and the even more extraordinary company they follow, and since, for the most part, we no longer have anything to fear, our role now being simply to wait for news of the circus’s imminent departure, I suggest we should stop exacerbating the sense of panic in the way that you,’ she smiled down on Valuska, ‘so pathetically are doing, and instead consider, all of us, our future course of action, for after what has happened here we cannot help but draw,’ and here she glared at the mayor hunched up in the corner, ‘the appropriate conclusions. I don’t by any means suggest that we are capable of resolving all the issues here and now,’ Mrs Eszter shook her head, ‘no, of course, it would be wrong to suggest that; nevertheless, events having fortunately sorted themselves out, we may at least conclude that the town, which in most regards seems to be suffering under some curse’ (‘The curse of indecision!’ Mrs Eszter’s old acquaintance, Harrer, cried out) ‘cannot be governed in the old way any more!’ This speech, which clearly had begun before Valuska arrived and whose proud rhetorical heights and sound sense were clearly appreciated by the powerful speaker herself, a speech that was formal yet exerted its own spell of sheer logic, had undoubtedly reached a climax, and since Mrs Eszter, her eyes full of triumph, was satisfied with its effect, it now came to end. The mayor, his eyes fixed on a spot in front of him with a bewildered expression, was vigorously nodding in support, but his whole mien showed he hadn’t stopped vacillating between the desired state of relief and all-consuming anxiety. The views of the chief of police could clearly be assumed, though for the moment he was not in a position to give them: his head back, his mouth wide open, he was still sleeping the sleep of the just on the bed, and this was the only thing that prevented him from granting his assent to the foregoing line of argument of which he undoubtedly approved. So the one person who remained capable of both speaking and doing, who wholeheartedly approved of the ‘stirring and cogent speech’ (if his heart and eyes could speak they would have approved even more loudly) and could in any case proclaim himself an unconditional and almost fanatical admirer of Mrs Eszter’s, was Harrer, the bringer of good news, who stood before them flushed and confused, his fat face blotchy with emotion as if he could still not adjust to being the centre of the attention, awarded to him on the strength of his role in events. He sat under the coat hanger, his knees firmly clamped together, with the sardine tin which served as an ashtray in one hand, the other continually flicking the tiny amounts of accumulated ash from his cigarette into it as if he were afraid that at any moment a grain or two of ash might fall on to the freshly swept floor; and so he puffed and flicked, puffed and flicked, and when he thought he could safely venture it without engaging her gaze, he glanced up at Mrs Eszter from under lowered lids, then quickly looked away and flicked his cigarette once more. It was apparent though that while seeming to avoid it, eye-contact was precisely what he was seeking; that he desired the sooner-or-later-inevitable clash of eyes; that, like all guilty parties, he would give anything to be able to summon up the courage to look the judge straight in the face; indeed, he gave a most convincing impression of someone groaning under the weight of a hitherto un-revealed act of darkness he was desperately anxious to redeem, something that, for him, mattered a great deal more than the circumstances currently prevailing in the market square — a thing that led him ‘wholeheartedly to approve’ of anything Mrs Eszter might say. No wonder then that in the silence that followed her last statement, he who had fed so intensely on her words should now be left clearly hungering for more, nor that when the mayor attempted to muddy the clear picture drawn by Mrs Eszter with some fussy point of order, he should regard this not so much as a questioning of his own veracity but as a crude insult to the dignity of their hostess and leap to his feet, cigarette in hand, forgetting the difference in their rank in the moment of his outrage, and make an unambiguous gesture ordering the mayor to shut up. ‘But,’ the mayor was saying, nervously passing his hand from where it had been massaging his brow across his bald pate right down to the nape of his neck, ‘what if this so-called “prince” should change his mind and stay here! He can say whatever he likes to Harrer but that doesn’t necessarily bind him. Who knows what we’re up against? Have we not acted too hastily? The only thing that bothers me is that we might — with all due respect — have sounded the retreat a little too early, too suddenly …!’ ‘The message,’ Mrs Eszter replied with due severity — and since Valuska was trying once again to rise from the stool she leaned on him in a reassuringly maternal fashion as if putting a child’s mind at rest—‘the clear message that Mr Harrer conveyed verbatim to the director — or so one hopes — from the leading members of the community who are still present and have not so far retreated an inch, let me remind him once more, unambiguously indicated that his request for police support, whatever might have been promised him by the already ailing chief of police, was not in our power to grant.’ The mere fact, the woman emphasized, that, however brave, the number of constables at our disposal amounts to no more than forty-two, means that ordering them out to control a possibly agitated crowd is not a step that should be taken lightly, so he should think carefully before doing anything. And since, ‘as we know from Mr Harrer’, it did make him think carefully, she, Mrs Eszter, had firm faith in his decision to leave the town forthwith, and any doubt she might have had was dispelled by the knowledge that, according to rumour, he had been in such situations before, so would be aware what might happen if he failed to keep his word. ‘I saw that man and you did not,’ Harrer added, less in bad conscience, more in her defence, ‘and he is a man of such strong will, he just has to wave his cigar at his company and they follow him like sheep!’ The hostess responded by icily thanking him for his passionate support, requesting him at the same time to return to the subject in hand and search his memory for anything he might have forgotten that related to his meeting with the director. ‘Well,’ he answered quietly and leaned forward as if imparting a confidence, ‘you know how people talk, but it seems he has three eyes and weighs no more than twenty pounds.’ ‘Thank you,’ she barked at him, ‘but let me put the question another way so you should understand it. Did the director say anything else to you beside that which you have told us already?’ ‘Well … no,’ the messenger closed his eyes, alarmed at the turn of events, neurotically flicking ash into the open tin. ‘In that case,’ the woman stated after a moment’s hesitation, ‘this is what I recommend. You, Mr Harrer, should go out into the square and come back immediately to report to us if the circus has started moving. We, your worship, will naturally remain here. As for you, János, I have a personal request …’ and at this point, after a good quarter of an hour, she let go of Valuska’s shoulder only to grab his arm, since he, frightened by Harrer, the mayor, the chief of police and Mrs Eszter too, would immediately have made a dash for the door. If he thought — and she gave him an encouraging look and leaned close to him in intimate fashion — that he had got over his state of shock, there was something important he could do that she, Mrs Eszter, being unable to leave her post, could not, unfortunately, however much she desired to do so, attend to. The chief, said she, indicating the bed that reeked of alcohol, whose sad condition was not entirely due, as it might seem, ‘to the quantity of drink he had consumed’ but to exhaustion caused by the weight of responsibility on his shoulders, was, on this extraordinary day, prevented from carrying out ‘his paternal duties’. What she was trying to say, Mrs Eszter elaborated, was that there was no one at home to look after his two children at this difficult time, and since someone had to feed them and, ‘since it was almost seven o’clock, and they were probably frightened’, reassure them and put them to bed, she, Mrs Eszter, immediately thought of Valuska. It was only a little thing, she crooned gently in his ear, but, she added humorously, ‘we will not forget even such trifles’, and she would be extremely grateful if he would agree — seeing how busy she herself was — to take the task on. Valuska would certainly have agreed, if only because he wanted to get away from her, and no doubt he would have answered with a firm yes, but he had no opportunity to do so for just at that moment the window-pane was shaken by a noise that sounded very much like a powerful explosion, and since there was no doubt as to where it came from — for even before the sound had faded everyone in the room knew something had happened in the market square to make the crowd cry out like that, they all froze and waited in perfect silence for it to die away — or for it to be repeated. ‘They’re going!’ Harrer broke the silence that had set in after the boom, but remained stock still, precisely where he was. ‘They’re staying!’ the mayor sobbed, then having admitted that he deeply regretted leaving his home since he didn’t actually know how he would get back, the route through back gardens probably being out of the question now, he suddenly made for the bed, shook the sleeper’s legs and shouted at him, ‘Wake up! Wake up!’ The chief, who could hardly be said to have added to the atmosphere of tension in the committee’s negotiations through any over-excitement on his part, lost none of his exemplary calm despite this merciless tugging, but slowly sat up, propped his elbows on the cushion, peered round through the slits of his inflamed eyes, then — stressing his words in a somewhat peculiar manner — answered, all right, but he wouldn’t do a damned thing until reinforcements arrived from the county, then collapsed back into the bed so as to re-establish the lost thread of his dreams — a thread that had been incomprehensibly cut and for no good reason — which offered the only chance of recovery, as quickly as possible. Only Mrs Eszter remained silent. She fixed her stern gaze on the ceiling and waited. Then slowly, deliberately, she met each pair of eyes, a barely suppressed smile of excitement flickering round her thin lips, and spoke. ‘Gentlemen, this is the moment of truth. I believe we are about to resolve the situation!’ Once again Harrer hastened to agree, but the mayor appeared to harbour one or two doubts on the subject, fidgeting with his tie, his head rocking from side to side. Valuska alone seemed unaffected by the ceremoniousness of her announcement, for his hand was already on the doorknob and, when given the sign for leaving, with the heavily breathing Harrer about to follow closely on his heels, he called back from the door in a broken voice (‘… But … Mr Eszter?’), and left with such a disappointed expression on his face you’d have thought the world had collapsed about him; indeed, his every movement suggested that he was going only because he could no longer bear to stay, it being pitifully plain that he had no idea where he was to go to. His world had indeed collapsed, since the hopes he had so painfully, so desperately reposed in Mrs Eszter and the committee had been deeply disappointed: had they not committed the tragic mistake of confusing the order of the two reports (Mrs Eszter’s initial sentence, ‘Well, that’s over,’ was still ringing in his head) and gone on to assume that Harrer’s came after his, and, placing no trust in him, simply failed to hear his words at all and, what was more, owing to his agitated state taken not the blindest bit of notice of him to the extent that Mrs Eszter had actually shut him up, and didn’t this mean that he had lost any chance of relying on them to help him!? Under the circumstances it hadn’t taken him long to realize — Mrs Eszter having wholly devoted herself to the task of calming the fully justified fears of the mayor — that it was pointless trying to influence the headlong thought-processes of his resolute hostess, he had to cope with the knowledge of the terrible sequence of events in the market square all by himself. All by himself, and since he understood that no one there had been interested in what might happen to his friend in Wenckheim Avenue, he also had to deal with Mr Eszter all by himself, and as if precisely because of this, a great silence had fallen on the room as it had on the square before; that is to say he saw that people were talking around him but as for hearing it, he had heard nothing, and would not have wanted to hear anything anyway: all he had wanted was the strong hand lifted from his shoulder at last, to be able to leave this place he had come to in vain, to feel the houses rushing past him so he could forget his sense of helplessness at knowing that he couldn’t simply yield to the irresistible force of the plan he had overheard at the circus door yet had no idea what to do about it. There was indeed nothing for it but to forget this sense of helplessness in ‘the feeling of houses rushing past him’, but he stopped for a moment at the gate to beg Mr Harrer not to go there (but Harrer, seeming to be deaf, answered by raptly repeating, ‘What a woman! What a woman!’ and was already running off in the direction of Kossuth Square), then adjusted the strap of his bag and, turning his back on the market square and his fast retreating landlord, set off in the opposite direction down the narrow pavement. He set off and houses and garden fences began to lurch past him but he felt rather than saw their fevered rushing for his eyes were incapable of seeing anything, not even the square blocks of paving at his feet; trees swept by him, their trunks at a slant, their bare branches trembling with anticipation in the murderous cold, lampposts leapt out of his way: everything was galloping, everything was in flight wherever he went, but all in vain, since neither the houses, nor the pavement slabs, nor the lampposts, nor the trees with their admonitory branches wanted to come to a stop, far from it, the more he wanted to force them back behind him the more he felt that they kept appearing again and again and somehow managed to get in front of him so that really he hadn’t passed a single one. First the hospital, then the skating rink, later the marble fountain on Erkel Square flashed before him, but in the chaos of images rattling past his inner eye he couldn’t decide, however hard he tried, whether he was where he seemed to be or had utterly failed to escape the immediate precincts of Mrs Eszter’s home, then, despite all this — as if accidentally realizing his desire to put a considerable distance between himself and The Prince’s domain in Kossuth Square and to enter his own as quickly as possible — he found himself where Eighteen Forty-Eight Avenue crossed the main road out of town and woke from the numbing labyrinth he had been trying to escape to the hazy consciousness that he was standing at the entrance to Mrs Plauf’s block, pressing the buzzer to her flat. ‘Mama, it’s only me …’ he bellowed into the set once he had rung several times and understood from the crackling of the speaker that his call had been noted but answered with silence. ‘Mama, it’s me, and I only want to tell …’ ‘What are you doing on the streets at this time?!’ the intercom barked at him, so loud and sudden he lost track of what he was saying. ‘I said, what are you doing on the streets at this time!?’ ‘Terrible things are happening, Mama …’ he tried to explain, leaning closer to the microphone—’… and I want to …’ Terrible things?’ the voice snapped back at him. ‘And you admit you know about it?! And despite that you insist on wandering about the streets at night?! Tell me, immediately, what have you been up to this time?! Do you want to kill your mother?! Haven’t you done enough to ruin me yet?!’ ‘Mama, Mama, just listen to me … for a moment …’ Valuska stammered into the intercom; ‘really … I mean you no harm … I would just like to have told you to … to … to lock your doors and … and let no one in, because …’ ‘You’ve been drinking!!!!’ the voice bellowed back, quite beside itself. ‘You’ve been drinking again, despite promising me you would never touch another drop! You keep drinking, though you have your little flat, but that’s not good enough for you, oh no, you must go roving round the streets! Very well, dear boy,’ the set hissed, ‘things will have to change round here! If you don’t go home at once you will never set foot in here again! You understand?!’ ‘Yes, Mama …’ ‘Then listen, listen very hard! If I hear, do you understand, if I once hear that you are hanging about in the streets and getting into trouble I’ll come down and find you and drag you by your hair if need be to the station … and I’ll have you locked up … you know where! I won’t put up with it, you understand, I won’t be disgraced by you again!!’ ‘No, certainly not, Mama … I’m going…. ’And he was going, just as he told the intercom he would, but somehow he couldn’t resign himself to having failed to convey the seriousness of the situation, so he stood there for a while lost in thought, resolving to turn round and try again, till it dawned on him that if he was incapable of recounting his experiences even to Mrs Eszter, there was practically no chance of his doing so to his mother. He couldn’t explain because she wouldn’t believe a word of what he said about The Prince and the factotum and she would only lose her temper with him again, not wholly unjustifiably, Valuska felt, for you couldn’t say she was precisely irritable, and the truth was that unless he had heard all that he had heard with his own ears, he would have been the first to cast doubt on the story or on the existence of anything so unlikely. Nevertheless — Valuska meandered down the deserted street — The Prince did exist, and that made it impossible to take a rational view of anything, since he required neither the quack mysticism of announcing himself as a celestial messenger, nor the operation of some inhuman desire to work harm in order to alter the shape of the world around him: his mere existence was enough to force it to abandon its habit of judging things by its own standards and encourage it to believe that there were principles at work here that negated its desire to label him as an unequivocal fraud. At the same time, the phenomenon of his mere existence — Valuska continued meandering — included elements both of quack mysticism and inhuman desire, as well as fraud, fury and harm, elements he did not bother to mask in the course of his haughty encounter with the director; the elements did not, however, constitute the person, but were simply the likely consequences of his clearly extraordinary and terrifying being, the full hidden significance and scope of which — apart from what could be concluded from a single stray remark — naturally lay beyond Valuska’s comprehension. He stumbled down one street after another, the words of The Prince buzzing round his head, and while the director’s characterization of The Prince’s activities as a wicked imposition remained persuasive, he was quite certain that this undoubtedly most mysterious member of the troupe was not merely a confidence trickster intent on enjoying the power reposed in him by an all too gullible public. Unlike the director, he found something profoundly terrifying in The Prince’s words, the pitiless and wholly alien clangour of them rendered all the more fearsome by the fact that they had been interpreted in piecemeal fashion by an intermediary whose grasp of Hungarian was less than perfect; he felt that this added to their profundity and, indeed, inevitability, or rather that the words implied a notion of something so utterly free and unfettered that any attempt to bind it into the disciplines of systematic thought would be vain. Vain, because The Prince seemed to emerge out of shadows of things where the conventions of the tangible world no longer applied, a place compounded of impossibility and incomprehensibility from which he radiated a magnetism so powerful that, even allowing for the regard in which he was held by those he considered ‘his own’, his status far exceeded that of a freak in any circus side-show. It was a pointless and hopeless task therefore — the houses, trees, paving slabs and lampposts began to slow down at this point — to attempt to understand something so extraordinary, but simply to give in — and he remembered the tense expressions on the faces in the market square — and allow the town to be sacked at a single word of dread command, when the sacking would include Mr Eszter’s residence (it was he himself who had unwittingly drawn their attention to it!) while Mr Eszter remained unsuspecting and defenceless; to abandon oneself to this notion and stand idly by as it happened — as everything around him slowed and came to a stop — was, he felt, impossible. He seemed to hear the screeching bird-like noises in his head again and this brought on a fresh wave of fear, so he stood still in it, knowing he could do no more than talk to people and warn them: ‘Lock your doors and stay put.’ He would tell everyone, he decided, from Mr Eszter to the brotherhood of man at the Peafeffer, from the dispersing employees of the railway company to the night porter, everyone — even the chief of police’s little brood should hear about it, he thought suddenly, and when on looking round he realized that he was but a block away from them, he made up his mind to start with the children who had in any case been entrusted to his care, then his employer, and extend his warning to the rest once he had done that. The block where the chief lived wore an anonymous look, as if pretending to be unaware of its important lodger hidden away on the first floor: the stucco had practically disappeared off the walls, a good length of drainpipe was missing further up, and as for the gate, it seemed to have solved the issue of whether it should stay open or shut by dispensing with its handle. The building could be approached only by negotiating heaps of rubbish brought out by the residents, while the path leading to the entrance from the pavement was obstructed by a stretch of detached iron railing someone happened to have left precisely in front of the doorway. Nor did the state of affairs inside offer a vast improvement on the exterior, for as soon as Valuska entered the stairwell he was hit by such a tremendous draught that his peaked cap was blown clean off his head as if by way of alerting him to the fact that nature was lord and master here. He set off up the concrete steps but the draught, instead of moderating, turned even more unpredictable: one moment it seemed to drop almost completely, the next it would assault him with renewed violence and vigour, so much so that he had to remove his cap and grip it in his hand while concentrating on breathing through his nose, and when he finally reached the right floor and pressed the bell he awaited the opening of the door as anxiously as someone who had just weathered a real hurricane. Unfortunately no one did open the door and the clamour of the bell died away together with the sound of frightened footsteps drumming in response to it, so he pressed it again, and once more, and was about to leap to the conclusion that there was someone in difficulty inside when he heard the key turning in the lock, but then the sound of drumming footsteps began once more, followed, again, by silence … It was warm in the apartment, hot even, and the walls with their rolled floral patterns blossomed in damp patches rising above the skirting board; he negotiated the coats, newspapers and shoes that were strewn across the narrow hall in the manner of an obstacle race, glanced into the kitchen and, still seeking an explanation for the curious manner of his reception, arrived in the sitting room, whereupon his frozen body was gripped by such a dreadful shivering he was quite unable to speak. He pulled at the strap of his bag across his shoulder, unbuttoned his coat and tried to stop himself trembling by energetically rubbing his numb limbs together. Suddenly he had the acute feeling that someone was standing behind him. He turned round, frightened, and indeed, he was not mistaken: there in the doorway of the sitting room stood the two children staring at him wordlessly, unmoving.’ ‘Oh,’ cried Valuska, ‘you quite frightened me!’ ‘We thought it was dad coming home….’ they replied and continued staring. ‘And do you always hide when your dad comes home?’ The boys made no answer but remained still, gazing solemnly at him. One looked about six, the other about eight years old; the younger boy was blond, the elder had brown hair, but both had inherited the chief’s eyes. Their clothes on the other hand had probably been passed on to them by the neighbour’s eldest, for both shirt and trousers, but chiefly the latter, looked as though they had seen all too many washing days and had so far faded that practically all the colour had gone out of them. ‘I ought to tell you,’ Valuska explained in a somewhat confused manner, feeling that they were not only looking at him but nervously weighing him up, ‘that your dad will be back late and that he asked me to … to put you to bed … Actually I have to go straight away, but it’s very important,’ he shivered again, ‘that you should lock the door after me, and whoever rings don’t let them in … In other words,’ he added in even greater confusion since the children made no attempt to move, ‘you should go to bed now.’ He began doing up his coat and cleared his throat awkwardly, not knowing what to do with them, and to stop them staring he tried smiling at them at which the younger relaxed a little, edged closer to him and asked him, ‘What’s in your bag?’ The question came as such a surprise to Valuska that he opened the bag, peered into it, then got down on his haunches and showed it to the children. ‘Newspapers, that’s all … I deliver them.’ ‘He’s a postman!’ the elder brother announced from the threshold with the annoyance and disdain befitting his seniority. “Course he’s not a postman!’ the other retorted. ‘Dad says he’s an idiot.’ He turned to the visitor once more and suspiciously took stock of him. ‘Are you really … an idiot?’ ‘No, I’m not,’ Valuska shook his head and stood up. ‘I’m not an idiot as you can see by looking at me.’ ‘Pity,’ the little one’s lip curled in disappointment. ‘I want to be an idiot and tell the king good and proper that his country is rubbish.’ ‘Don’t be stupid!’ The older one pulled a hideous face behind him and Valuska tried to gain his sympathy too by asking, ‘Why? And what would you like to be?’ ‘Me? I want to be a good cop,’ the boy answered with pride, but with some diffidence as if unwilling to reveal the full extent of his plans to a stranger. ‘And put everyone in jail,’ he folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the doorpost, ‘all the drunkards and all the idiots.’ ‘The drunkards, yes,’ ‘the little one agreed, then shouting, ‘Death to the drunkards!’ began jumping and cavorting round the room. Valuska felt he ought to say something now so that having gained their confidence they might obey him and go to bed, but nothing worthwhile occurred to him and he closed his bag, stepped over to the window and looked out on the dark street; then, suddenly remembering that he should be on his way to Mr Eszter, he lost patience. ‘I’m afraid,’ he raised his cap with trembling hands and ran his fingers through his hair, ‘I’ve got to go.’ ‘I’ve already got my uniform,’ announced the older boy by way of response and, seeing that Valuska was ready to depart and had set off in the direction of the hall, he added, ‘If you don’t believe me, I’ll show you!’ ‘Me too! Me too!’ The younger one jumped up and down and, making car noises, steered his way in hot pursuit of his brother. There was no escape since Valuska had taken only a step or two down the hall before a door opened and slammed behind him and there they stood, to attention, with enigmatic looks on their faces. Both were wearing genuine police tunics: the smaller one’s scraped along the ground, but the one on the older boy reached only down to his knee; even though they looked comical in them — you could have got three of them into either of the jackets — the jackets were so well made, the proportions were so exact, it was clear they had only to grow into them. ‘I say … really …’ Valuska muttered approvingly and would have made his way outside but the little one produced a box from behind his back, squinted up at him and simply said, ‘Here, look!’ So Valuska was forced to admire a sharpened stick which, he was informed, ‘was to poke the enemy’s eyes out’, after which he had to admit that the Swedish razor was probably best fitted ‘to cut the enemy’s throat’ and, lastly, conceded that the splinters of ground glass in the stoppered jar would certainly be effective enough ‘to dispose of anyone’ if smuggled into their drink. ‘That’s nothing …! I gave him all those things, they’re for kids in infant school …!’ the older one commented disparagingly from the kitchen doorway. ‘But if you want to see something really interesting, look here!’ And so saying he drew a real revolver from his pocket. He laid it in his palm then slowly closed his fingers about it so that Valuska, retreating instinctively, could hardly get his words out. ‘But, well … how did you come by this …?! “That’s not important now!’ The boy shrugged and tried to spin the gun on his index finger, without success, for the sheer momentum sent it clattering to the floor. ‘I’d really like you to give that to me….’ Valuska said, making a frightened grab for it, but the boy was faster, snatched the revolver up and pointed it directly at him. ‘That’s a very dangerous thing …’ Valuska explained, holding his hands out before him. ‘You shouldn’t play with it …’ and then, since the gun didn’t move and because both of them were staring at him exactly as they had when he first arrived in the sitting room, he began to back away mechanically until he reached the front door. ‘Fine,’ he said, pressing the handle behind him. ‘I am really scared. But … now …’the door opened, ‘do put it back where it belongs or your dad … will be cross with you … Go to bed now, quietly …’he slipped through, ‘be good and go to sleep’; at last he could carefully close the door on them and mutter, more to himself than anyone else, ‘… and lock up everything … don’t let anyone in …’ He heard the laughter inside, he heard the key turn in the door, then, clutching his official peaked cap, made his way down the stairs through the violent gusts that broke about him. Two pairs of staring eyes were fixed on him nor could he free himself from their piercing, penetrating rays; having trembled in the heat of that chaotic room, now that he had left the building he began to shake with cold. He shook with cold in the chill that penetrated him to the bone, but he was equally chilled by a thought he had hitherto believed unthinkable: the thought that two children and such ruthless icy passion could be part of the same thought. He transferred the bag from one shoulder to the other, buttoned his coat up and, feeling that he could not bear the thought otherwise, tried not to think of the tightly gripped pistol, the mocking laughter behind the closed door, but to concentrate on getting to the house in Wenckheim Avenue as quickly as possible. He tried not to think of it, but the two boys in their enormous police tunics seemed to be dancing before his eyes and he suddenly felt a tweak of conscience that he had left them there with a possibly loaded weapon and wondered if he should turn back, a temptation he abandoned, but abandoned absolutely only once he had turned from Árpád Street into the main boulevard and noticed that not too far away, somewhere in the direction of the city centre, just above the rooftops, a reddish glow was rising. A terrifying thought struck him: ‘They’ve started burning things’—and suddenly all his feelings of guilt and doubt disappeared, he clutched his bag, so it shouldn’t keep slapping at his side, and started running through the array of stray cats, towards Mr Eszter’s house. He ran and, having arrived, stood in the doorway, his arms outstretched, then — having realized in his one remaining moment of lucidity that he would succeed only in frightening his unsuspecting master by breaking in on him — resolved on remaining there, determined to repel any likely intruders. How he would do this he had no idea, and for a good while he could explain his own fear of unexpected assault only in terms of the panic brought on by the mere possibility of incendiary attacks (for he had no way of being sure that that was what he had seen). Meanwhile the sky continued red and Valuska paced up and down before the gate, ready to spring into action, taking now four steps to the right, now four to the left, and no more than four because by the fifth he would have been aware that the other side had been left unguarded, lost in the thickening darkness. Things happened very quickly after that, in fact in a single moment. Suddenly he heard footsteps, the sound of a hundred boot-clad feet approaching, tired, exhausted feet scraping the ground. A group of men stood before him and slowly encircled him. He saw their hands, their stumpy fingers, and would have liked to say something. But a voice behind them croaked, ‘Wait!’ and, without seeing his face, he recognized the grey broadcloth overcoat and knew immediately that the figure walking up to him through the open ring of men couldn’t be anyone else but the new friend he had made in the market square. ‘Don’t be afraid. You’re coming with us,’ the man whispered in his ear and put his arm about his shoulders. And Valuska couldn’t say anything, but set off with them; nor did the other speak but leaned across him, using his free hand to push aside a grinning figure who tried to insinuate himself next to Valuska in the dark. He heard hundreds of exhausted feet scraping the ground behind him, he saw the stray cats at his own feet as they scattered in fear before the silently advancing mass of raised iron stakes, but he felt nothing except the weight of the hand on his shoulder steering him through the army of fur caps and heavy boots. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ the other man repeated. Valuska gave a quick nod and glanced up at the sky. He glanced up and suddenly had the sensation that the sky wasn’t where it was supposed to be; terrified, he looked up again and confirmed the fact that there was indeed nothing there, so he bowed his head and surrendered to the fur caps and boots, realizing that it was no use to search because what he sought was lost, swallowed up by this coming together of forces, of details, of this earth, this marching.