The Melancholy of Resistance

IT WAS THE CHERRIES PRESERVED IN RUM THAT she liked best. The others were nice too, but now, after precisely two weeks of tense preparation, the day had come when, before the very important event to follow in the afternoon, there was sufficient time to consider minor details and she might decide which particular preserves of all those stored in the cupboard of the temporary secretarial office, preserves selected from among various hams and other cold meats taken from Mrs Plauf’s apartment under the ‘social use’ rule and brought to the cellar of the town hall where she and Harrer had divided them up between themselves, she would most prefer for breakfast, and she had firmly chosen this one, not because the peach or pear fell short of the cherries in quality, but because when she tasted the delicate concoction prepared by ‘Mrs Plauf who had met such a sad fate’ the fruit soaked in rum, with its ‘subtly resistant acridity’, reminded her of an evening visit that seemed to belong to an almost antediluvian past, and her mouth was immediately filled with the taste of victory, the triumph she had hardly had time to savour but now at last could wallow in as she sat at her ease behind her enormous desk with the whole morning ahead of her, since she had nothing to do but lean over the jar with a teaspoon so not a drop should be spilt, and lift out one cherry after another, breaking the skins gently with her teeth, wholly immersed in the undisturbed enjoyment of office and reviewing the vital steps that had led to it. It was, she believed, no exaggeration, to refer to the events of the last fourteen days as ‘a veritable transfer of power’ which had propelled ‘one who had deserved it’ from a room in Honvéd Passage, rented by the month, and an undeniably prophetic though hardly, at that stage, significant post on the women’s committee, straight to the secretarial office of the town hall; no exaggeration at all, she thought as she bit another cherry in half and spat the stone into the litter basket at her feet, since this mark of honour was really no more than ‘the direct consequence of the recognition of her superior lucidity of mind’, a superiority that had delivered the fate of the town, with a firmness that bore no question, once and for all into her hands, which were entirely capable of exercising the appropriate powers, so that she should do with the town whatever (she almost said, ‘whatever she wanted’) she, Mrs Eszter, who only a fortnight ago was unforgivably sidelined but was now mistress of all she surveyed (‘… and, let us add,’ she added, trying a brief smile, ‘had carried off all the laurels at one go’), thought fit to do in its present or future interest. Naturally there was no suggestion that the office had merely ‘fallen into her lap’, for she had earned it, having risked everything, but she didn’t mind people saying that ‘her rise was meteoric’, for when she thought it over, she herself could think of no better figure of speech; none, since it had taken only fourteen days for the whole town to be ‘spread at her feet’, fourteen days, or rather, a single night, or, to be even more exact, a mere few hours in which everything was decided, including ‘who was who and who had real power’. A few hours, Mrs Eszter marvelled, that’s all it took, when on the fateful evening, or to be more accurate, early afternoon, some sixth sense told her the task was not to prevent the likely course of events but, on the contrary, to give them full play, allow them the maximum scope, since deep down in her bones she felt what ‘those three hundred or so sinister bandits’ in the market square might mean to her, provided — and she had to countenance the possibility—‘they were not merely an army of mother’s boys who, when it came to it, would run from their own shadows’. Well, she leaned back in her chair, they really did shrink from nothing, but she, once having decided on a course of action, had never lost her head, had taken every possibility into account, and moved with absolute and fatal precision only when she had to, and ‘events’ moved so steadily in the desired direction, at the desired pace, that occasionally, particularly later in the night, she began to feel she was plotting and directing their course, rather than taking advantage of their, in any case, favourable essence. Certainly she had a clear idea of her own worth — she leaned forward and popped another cherry into her mouth — but no one could have charged her with arrogance or hollow vaingloriousness, she thought, though ‘they should allow her’, at least now, in the present circumstances, in her solitary cherry picking, ‘the credit, not only for the stroke of genius in conceiving of the timetable of events, but for her care over detail’, without which the grandest schemes are doomed to disappointment. No, she admitted it, it didn’t require an above-average intelligence to wind the few members of the committee she herself had organized in Honvéd Passage round her little finger on that memorable afternoon, especially the mayor, who was paralysed with fear; nor did it take any great effort to arrange that the chief of police, who, as the night wore on, was growing dangerously sober and was about to send out for reinforcements, should, unknown to the others, be smuggled by her (on the pretext of showing him out) into her lodger’s quarters where her female tenant kept the unmanned ‘bag of booze’ serviced with her awful wine right until morning so he would be safely tucked up in dreamland; it was ‘no problem’—Mrs Eszter curled her lip — enticing her blindly obedient follower, Harrer, to find ‘that half-wit Valuska’ who might instinctively have suspected something and put together certain facts in his ‘addled brain’, to find him and silence him by persuading him to leave by the most direct way: no, all this leading of the distinguished company by the nose did not require ‘any particular intelligence’, but the im-pecc-able (the secretary tapped her teaspoon on the table for emphasis) timing of events, now that was something! Ultimately, to have arranged matters so that every part of the machinery should be oiled and working smoothly, ‘planning on the hoof and bringing the plan to realization’ in order that she should be able to sweep away every obstacle before her well-placed allies, all in one blessed moment, and then to build on that precise moment so that she should develop an immediate reputation for muscle, which would in turn raise her to the position of the most likely leader of the resistance, all this, ‘even had the conception itself been of a far more modest nature’, amounted to an achievement — she brushed away a lock of hair that had fallen on to her forehead — that was ‘not exactly ordinary’! Very well, she waved away her own interjection, there was no need to explain that her work on all those apparently insignificant details would have amounted to nothing if she had lacked the central vision by which her plans for the future ‘stood or fell’, since it was as clear as daylight that apart from the harmonization and timing of all the details, the thing that really mattered was the timing of the whole, in other words to decide, sound out and in-stinct-ual-ize the perfect moment when she could employ Harrer ‘in the police chief’s name’ to bring into play the two policemen in the Jeep who had been waiting prepared for hours, wholly ignorant of the reason for delay, behind the Milk Powder Factory — prepared to go for ‘immediate’ reinforcements, to the county capital … If the ‘forces of liberation’ had arrived too early there would have been only ‘some minor acts of vandalism’, a few broken windows, a smashed shop-front or two, and by the following day life would have carried on as before: if too late, the scale of the conflict might have swept her away too, and it would have been all in vain; yes, thought Mrs Eszter as she recalled ‘the tense atmosphere of those heroic hours’, she had to find the median point between those two extremes, and — she looked round the secretarial office in triumph — thanks to Harrer’s valuable services as messenger and to the availability of constantly fresh information, she did find that point and that meant she had nothing to do but to allow news of the influx of soldiers to filter out through her door in the person of the deathly pale mayor who was dying to get home, then compose her mind as to what she should say while the two policemen returned with the message: ‘Would the town’s saviour care to come over to the town hall?’ In retrospect perhaps her greatest moment had been when she stood before the colonel and, without having to change a word of her speech, could tell him the precise truth, though she had to admit that she could scarcely have done anything else, since something in her heart at the first moment of their meeting told her that the commanding officer of the liberating forces would ‘liberate’ not only the town, but herself. Everything, even to that point, had been as easy as pie, and since she took care in her preliminary remarks to disown the title so generously bestowed on her (to the effect that she was no hero, she did only what any feeble woman might do in similar circumstances, surrounded as she was by impotence, helplessness and cowardice enough to bring a blush to anyone’s cheeks), all she needed to do was to present her information in the best order and in simple, clear and precise sentences to convey the ‘sad, but true’ fact that there had been a social breakdown owing to ‘inadequate arrangements on the part of the authorities’, nothing more, the chief police officer not being in ‘the proper place at the proper time’, for if he had the mob could not have been brought to the point of lawlessness by a small group of drunken hooligans. She would not claim, she added when she had finished her account of events, that this state of anarchy was not representative of the town’s condition, for that was precisely what it was, since the circumstances that had allowed this vandalism to flourish had their root in ‘the general lack of discipline’. She would be astonished, she waved her hand in the direction of the council-chamber door on that ‘most glorious of dawns’, if the colonel had the patience to listen to the testimony of all those local people waiting outside, which would be enough to try a saint’s patience, for he would soon see what a pitiable gathering of lily-livered cowards she had had to cope with these last few decades in the noble cause of ‘law, order and clear thinking’ so that they might attain some sense of reality (the secretary shivered with pleasure at the word even now in the midst of her meditations) and be led away from ‘the foul marsh of illusions in which they foundered’ back to health, action and a respect for re-a-li-sm, which demanded that all the self-deluded, mystificatory, paralysed members of society should simply be ‘swept away’, along with those who cravenly hid from responsibility, from ‘the daily appointed tasks’ incumbent on them, and those who failed to realize or attempted to ignore the fact that life was a war where there were winners and losers, lulled as they were by the mystical illusion that weaklings might be insured against their fate, who attempted to ‘stop any breath of fresh air’ by suffocating the source with soft little pillows. Instead of muscles they cultivated rolls of fat and bags of skin; instead of fit bodies they encouraged wasting and excess; instead of clear bold looks they went about with self-centred little squints: to come to the point, they chose saccharine illusions over reality! She didn’t want to get carried away, but she was forced to live in an atmosphere that she could describe only as stifling, Mrs Eszter burst out bitterly to the colonel, but he knew as well as she did that no matter which end of a fish you take, head or tail, as the saying goes, it stinks just the same; the court had only to look at the state of the streets to see what a sorry pass the patently unfit leadership had brought the town to, and no doubt they would draw the inevitable conclusions from that … Though at this point, she recalled with a blush, she was hardly aware of what she was saying as she was falling ever more under the colonel’s spell, and he, before ‘the saviour of the place’ found herself utterly flustered, thanked her for her report with a simple nod, and with ‘a look that said everything’ invited her to be present at the interrogations; yes, she had fallen under his spell, a hot flush ran through the secretary, that nod had bowled her over, since her ‘heart’ told her, not with a single thump but with a veritable rumble of thunder, that though no one in her fifty-two years had managed to ‘set off that mechanism’, here was one who could! Here was someone who immediately drew her into his enchanting presence, someone with whom she immediately established ‘a silent dialogue’, someone who could (no, ‘did’, she corrected herself with another blush) make something she had never even dared to think might happen come true! It was a wonder that ‘such a feeling really existed’ and it wasn’t simply romantic nonsense that people fell in love ‘at first sight’, ‘blindly’ and ‘for ever’; that there was a condition in which one stood as if struck by lightning and wondered agonizingly whether the other felt the same! For ever since the interrogations had begun, she really had ‘just stood there’ for hours on end in the council chamber, and even though she did not neglect to pay due attention to the increasingly advantageous procedure, her spellbound being was ‘essentially’ focused, from beginning to end, on the colonel in the background. His build? His bearing? His appearance? She would have found it difficult to say, but until ‘their fate was sealed’ she waited, now in heaven, now in hell (‘He is thinking of me … No, he hasn’t even noticed me’), for the moment that he stood up — yes, he was standing up! — and came over to her to give her some secret sign, practically to declare his affection! It was all fire, all flames within, high on a peak one moment, deep in the pits the next, though no one would have known this to look at her, because even then, when, in the course of dealing with the matter of Valuska, thanks to her presence of mind, they managed to free themselves of Eszter (who, fortunately, had failed to reveal his name) in the most marvellous way without any agonizing prelude, and then, by a kind of mutual conspiracy, got rid of Harrer too by sending him about various commissions, so that finally they were left alone in the hall; even then she was capable of exercising remarkable control over her facial muscles if not her feelings, which she covered with a happy smile at the corner of her lips, there being nothing left that could stop her. She took a cherry, slipped it into her mouth, but did not bite it, simply sucked at it and thought back to the empty hall and the ten to fifteen minutes that followed: the colonel had begged her pardon for his earlier loss of temper, to which she answered that it was understandable that a real man should fail to keep his temper in the presence of so many ninnies, then they talked a little about the state of the nation, and in the course of passionately declaiming one thing and mildly decrying another, he interjected a passing remark about how wonderfully those ‘two tiny earrings’ suited her. They talked about the future of the town and agreed that ‘a firm hand was what was needed’, though they would have to discuss the precise details of how and when the next day under calmer circumstances, the colonel declared, gazing deeply into her eyes, while she, after a moment’s thought, accepted the idea, and, since she had always considered her individual life as subject to the public good, suggested the best place for this might be with a cup of tea and some nice little cakes in her own apartment at 36 Béla Wenckheim Avenue … So everything was pretty well arranged, Mrs Eszter nodded approvingly as she slowly squashed the cherry against the roof of her mouth with her tongue, everything, since there was nothing else that might explain this mutual attraction, this surge of feeling and, now she could say it, the veritable explosion of their discovery of each other, for beside the sheer sense of delight, it was, for her, the compatibility, the immediate recognition of their having been made for each other, the extraordinary speed and power of the tide that swept them together, that seemed the most wonderful, the way — as it soon transpired — not only for her, but for him too, ‘things’ had been resolved in a moment, and there was no real need for those ten or fifteen minutes — the colonel’s words died quietly away in her — merely to ‘build a few bridges’. She hadn’t hesitated, she hadn’t stopped to weigh things up, she had prepared for the evening by giving only half her mind to the immediate issues involved in the so-called, but in all probability, short ‘interregnum’, giving speeches at her gate, consoling the bereaved, making announcements to the effect of ‘tomorrow we start rebuilding our future’, then — since who was she now to fuss over minor matters of transportage? — arranging with Harrer the transfer of her hastily packed effects by a bunch of layabouts from Honvéd Passage to the house in Wenckheim Avenue, and having assigned the wholly unresisting Eszter, whom events had once again bypassed, to the servants’ room next to the kitchen, proceeding to throw out the tired old furniture and, putting her bed, chair and table in their place, installing herself in the drawing room. She dressed herself in her finest clothes, the black velvet outfit, the one with the long zip at the back, prepared water for the tea, arranged a few pieces of cake on an aluminium tray covered in paper, and carefully brushed her hair behind her ears. That was all there was to it, no more was needed, for in their two persons — the colonel, who arrived at precisely eight o’clock on the dot, and she herself, unable any longer to control her feelings — two wholly consuming passions had met, two passions that required nothing apart from each other, two souls who celebrated their eternal union through the corresponding ‘union of the body’. She had had to wait fifty-two years, but it had not been in vain, because that wonderful night a real man taught her that ‘the body was worth nothing without the soul’, because that unforgettable encounter, which lasted well into dawn before they fell asleep, brought not only sensual fulfilment but — and she hadn’t been ashamed to use the word on that dawn—love. She would never have thought that this wonderful realm existed at all, that she’d get to know quite so many ‘delightful manoeuvres in that delicious battle’ or that the ‘swell of the rising tide’ in her heart could be so liberatingly intoxicating, though the key that unlocked the hidden recesses of her being — she shut her eyes and blushed all over again as she confessed it — lay in the colonel’s hands. In the figure of her colonel, whom she addressed, ‘quite naturally’ by this time, as Peter, in whose strong arms she had suffered ecstasy some eight times, and who with his own hands had sealed this jar of preserves with cellophane and a rubber band, she had found someone with whom she could arrange the town’s future but at the same time discuss the situation in general. What kind of country was this, they asked in complete agreement (and now that she recalled it, it was seven times), that required a military tribunal, an officer with absolute authority and a full military unit at his disposal to march to and fro in order to preserve local law and order? What kind of country was it where soldiers were employed as firemen to flit here and there and put out the fiddling flames started by a few emboldened hooligans? ‘Believe me, my dear Tunde,’ the colonel grumbled again, ‘I can hardly bear to look at the single tank you saw in the main square, I’m so ashamed of it! I drag it about with me like the old ruffian with the cigar does his whale. I show it to give people a fright, for apart from one or two training exercises I can’t remember a single occasion when I’ve fired the thing, and I didn’t set out with the idea of running a circus but to be a soldier and, naturally, I want to fire it!’ ‘Then fire it, Peter …!’ she replied flirtatiously, and he did, seven times, one after another, for every agreement and command could wait till the next day, it was the present that interested them now, the inexhaustible joy of being together, in love; then, at dawn, he bade her farewell in front of the house, and as he got into the waiting Jeep they said those words that wanted to say so much more (‘Tünde!’ ‘Peter!’) and he shouted out the promise she had not forgotten as he was leaving in the still dim light from the window of the disappearing Jeep: ‘I’ll call round whenever I can!’ No one who knew her at all — she rose from the writing desk — could say that she had ever lacked the strength, but the energy with which she attacked the task of planning after that decisive night surprised even her, and within fourteen days she had not only ‘swept away the old and established the new’ but on further ‘continuous surges of energy’ she had earned local people’s praise and support, local people who, according to all the evidence, had finally come to recognize that it was ‘better to burn in a fever of activity than to put your slippers on and hide your head in the pillows’, people who, since she had gained their confidence, no longer con-de-scend-ed to her, but on the contrary — she stepped over to the window, her hands behind her back—‘looked up’ to her. The fact was — she scanned the street from one end to the other — she had found herself in a situation where whatever she did met with immediate success, everything came easily and naturally to hand, and the entire ‘assumption of power’ was no more than child’s play: all she had to do was to reap the fruit of her labours. The first week had been spent chiefly in ‘picking up the threads’, that is to say in carefully watching whether the fates of the more prominent witnesses and ‘the analysis and investigation of the vandalism’ were really proceeding according to plan, or rather, accorded to the elements of the account she had given that memorable day in the council chamber, and noting with amazement how everything was falling perfectly into place, how every judgement, human or divine, that affected those who had taken part seemed, almost supernaturally, to support her position. The circus had done its valuable work, because, even if The Prince and his factotum had not yet been caught, the director (‘the old cigar-smoking ruffian’ as Peter referred to him) had been deported, the whale removed and the prison was stuffed with ‘various aiders, abetters and accomplices’, and, so that local events should not trigger even minor incidents in the surrounding area, they cleverly spread the rumour that the company had been working under the instruction of foreign intelligence agencies. The chief of police, at least until his transfer to Vas County, had been assigned for three months to an alcohol-dependency institution somewhere out in the sticks and his two boys placed in a children’s home, and, in the meantime, the powers of the old mayor — who was allowed to keep his title — had been transferred to his newly appointed secretary. Valuska, who hadn’t got very far that ‘epoch-making morning’ (‘epoch-making’ for him to be sure), if only because he had stopped to ask directions of a policeman the previous night, had been sectioned ‘for life, for all practical purposes’ in a secure ward of the town’s mental asylum. Harrer had been appointed to the town hall staff as a temporary secretarial assistant until some permanent post could be found for him, and, to cap it all, the town had been advanced a considerable amount of credit for ‘development’. That was just the first week — Mrs Eszter cracked her knuckles behind her back — by the second her tidy yard and orderly house movement had ‘got up a real head of steam’, so that within five days of ‘the terrible riot’, shops had opened and their shelves were beginning to show ‘signs of commercial activity’; the whole population was going about its business and had continued to do so; all the administrative departments were up and functioning, with the old staff, it is true, but with a new spirit; there was teaching in the schools, telephone communications had improved, fuel was available once more so that traffic could get moving again, albeit in a much reduced but still valuable fashion, trains were running quite well in the circumstances, the streets were fully lit at night and there was plenty of wood and coal to keep the fires burning; in other words, the transfusion had been successful, the town was breathing again and she — she moved her neck gently to refresh herself — was standing at the apex of it all. There was no time to ponder how things might proceed from here, for at that moment her hitherto uninterrupted reflections were brought to an abrupt end by a knock on the door, so she returned to her desk, hid the preserve jar, adjusted her chair, cleared her throat and crossed her legs. Then, once she had pronounced a loud and resonant ‘Come in!’ Harrer entered, shut the door behind him, took a step towards the desk, stepped back again, hesitated, crossed his hands in front of his lap and, in his usual shifty way, cast sharp glances here and there to see whether anything important had happened in the interval between his knocking and the invitation to enter. He was bringing news, he said, ‘concerning the matter’ with which the good lady had entrusted him last Monday: he had at last found a man who, in his opinion, might be accepted into the new police force at a low level, in that he satisfied both requirements, being, on the one hand, local, and on the other — Harrer blinked — having already shown his ‘suitability on a specific occasion’; and, since there was plenty of time left before the funeral he had brought him straight here from the Nile public house, and because he had assured him that anything that might be said would remain confidential, behind closed doors, the ‘person in question’ was willing to put himself ‘to the test’, and therefore, Harrer suggested, they might conduct the interview right here and now. ‘Now, perhaps,’ the secretary retorted, ‘but not here!’ then, after a moment’s thought, she gave Harrer a real dressing down for not being careful enough, asking him finally what he was doing in the Nile when his place should have been beside her from morning till night, and, dismissing his excuses, explained to him that half an hour from now, not a minute earlier or later, he should appear together with the ‘person in question’ at the house in Wenckheim Avenue. Harrer didn’t dare say anything, just gave a nod to signify he understood, and another in response to the parting remark, ‘… and the secretarial car should be waiting in front of the house at a quarter past twelve!’ then slipped out while Mrs Eszter, with a careworn expression on her face, made a note to herself that unfortunately she must get used to the fact that ‘someone in her position cannot relax for a minute’. But she did not seriously fear that her splendidly industrious, but impulsive right-hand man (‘you have to watch him or he gallops off on some daft idea …’), who had to be kept on a tight leash, had entirely spoilt what had promised to be a quiet morning of ‘the enjoyment of newly gained power’, for as soon as she left the office and stepped through the doors of the town hall in her simple leather coat, tens if not hundreds of people turned immediately to her, and once she reached Árpád Street ‘a veritable guard of honour’ might have been formed of the citizens conscientiously labouring in front of their houses. Everyone was hard at work: grandfathers, grandmothers, men, women, large and small, thin and fat, were all busy with pickaxes, spades and wheelbarrows clearing up the ice-bound rubbish on the pavement and the areas designated for them in front of their gates, clearly going at it with ‘great relish’. Each little group, as soon as she reached them, stopped work for a moment, downed pickaxe, spade and wheelbarrow, greeted her with an occasional cheerful, ‘Good day!’ or, ‘Taking the air, are we?’ and, since it was an open secret that she was the president of the movement’s evaluation committee, set to work again even more heartily than before, if that was possible. Once or twice she heard voices some way ahead of her announcing, ‘Here comes our secretary!’ and there was no reason for her to be embarrassed by the fact that her heart was thumping proudly halfway down Árpád Street; she continued at a brisk pace, moving past them with a little wave here and there, though once these greetings started showering down on her with ever more vehemence towards the end of the street, she couldn’t help but relax her well-known grim expression — grim because she carried so much expectation and responsibility on her shoulders! — and almost smile. Had she not repeated a hundred times in the last fortnight that it was best to draw a veil over what had passed, because it was only ‘by considering “what should be” and “what we want” that we get from square one to square two’; no, she had never ceased filling their ears with that ‘clarion call’, but now, for the first time, following this rewarding display of confidence, she herself considered taking that advice, thinking, ‘Yes, let’s draw a veil over that,’ but as she turned the corner of the avenue she reminded herself, ‘What was I to you, or you to me?’ The masses cannot achieve anything without a leader, but without their confidence — she opened the gate to the house — the leader is impotent, and these particular masses were ‘not at all such bad material’ though, she immediately added, she herself ‘was no ordinary leader’. We shall be all right, ladies and gentlemen, she reflected with satisfaction as she thought of the people in Árpád Street, and later, once there had been some progress, ‘the leash need not be so tight, nor the secretary so demanding’, since, in the last analysis, there was nothing more she herself wanted, as everything she desired — her feet rang down the floor of the hall—was hers already. She had recovered what had been taken from her and gained all she had hoped for, since power, indeed the supreme power, was in her hands, and her ‘crowning achievement’ had, she might say, as she entered the drawing room in a deeply moved state of mind, ‘literally’ fallen into her lap. Her thoughts were running on a little as they did in the office, or just because they tended to do so anyway, and especially in the last two weeks when they ran so repeatedly to the man she never stopped expecting day and night but who, unfortunately, had failed to ‘call round’. Sometimes she woke from a dream to the sound of a Jeep, at other times, and ever more frequently, chiefly at home in the drawing room, she had a sudden feeling … it couldn’t be and yet … she had to turn round because she felt that someone — it was he! — was standing behind her, which didn’t mean that she was anxious about his absence, simply that ‘life was empty without him …’—a feeling entirely understandable in one ‘whose heart was full of love’. She waited for him morning, noon and night, and in her imagination she saw him as she always did, commanding a tank as it careered along, dignified, not moving a muscle, then putting his eyes to the binoculars hanging round his neck and ‘scanning the far horizon’ … It was this heroic image that flashed before her now, but dissolved like smoke when she heard someone ‘shuffling around’ the hall again, someone across whom she had quite definitely ‘drawn the veil of the past’, but who, nine days after Valuska’s fate had been decided, went out every day at precisely eleven in the morning, returning at about eight at night, to deposit an appeal on his behalf. This was really the only evidence she had that Eszter was still alive, that is apart from the occasional flushing of the toilet, the dull distant sound of the piano that had been taken through into the servants’ room, and the bits of news she was sometimes given about him: otherwise, it was as if he wasn’t there, as if his little lair had nothing to do with the rest of the house. Altogether she had seen him once or twice that fortnight, chiefly on the day of ‘the historically significant repossession’ of the house, and since her security arrangements by which the servants’ room was inspected each evening had always reported the same thing — the opened scores, the works of Jane Austen piled into two columns, and the occupant, that is if he was in, either reading (‘The sheer bloody boredom of it!’) or playing the piano (‘Bloody romantics!’) — she had put an end to them the day before. It was not only that he no longer presented any kind of threat to her, but because she ‘had not the slightest shred of interest’ in either his doings or his existence, and on the rare occasions she did think of him she was forced to ask herself, ‘Was this the force you triumphed over?’ Over this dummy, this fool, this ‘creaking wreck’ who, through his loyalty to that half-wit, had reduced himself to a mere shadow! Because that’s all he was, thought Mrs Eszter as she heard him shuffle down the hall, a feeble shadow of even his former self, a pitiful geriatric, a terrified rabbit, ‘a trembling old ratbag, whose eyes are always watering’, who, instead of shaking off the shackles of the very memory of Valuska, had got himself so wrapped up in his ‘fatherly’ feelings that he had forfeited the utterly incomprehensible respect in which he had been held and was now suddenly regarded as ‘a subject of general ridicule’. From the morning on which Valuska’s fate had been so reassuringly decided, instead of shutting himself away as before, he dragged himself through town, in full sight of everyone twice every blessed day — once at eleven when he went out, once, at about eight, when he returned — in order to sit in the Yellow House with the completely silent Valuska in his stripy gown (apparently he couldn’t bring himself even to open his eyes now) and, so people said, talk to him or, like a real headcase, simply sit in silence himself. There was no sign at all that ‘this living monument to the most humiliating defeat’ would ever come to his senses, sighed Mrs Eszter as she heard the distant noise of the gate eventually being closed, since this, no doubt, was what they would go on doing as long as they lived, much to the amusement of this town at the threshold of a new age, sitting silently beside each other, gently holding hands; yes, that is how it would most probably be, she thought as she stood up and started arranging the room for ‘the interview’, though it didn’t matter to her either way, for what harm could this tiny blemish in her past do to her current position, here ‘at the pinnacle’, and in any case she could bear this twice-daily ‘quiet, funereal procession’ down the hall, at least until she could find ‘an opportune moment’ to arrange a long-overdue quick divorce. She pulled the table and chair closer to the window so the ‘candidate’ should have no opportunity of ‘clutching at anything for support’ in the room, which was pretty bare in any case, and when, after a good minute (‘You’re late!’ Mrs Eszter frowned), Harrer appeared escorting the ‘soldier-to-be’, ushering him to the centre of the room, the latter, who had arrived confidently, with his chest puffed out, quickly, and according to plan, softened under pressure. He’s as strong as a bull, thought the secretary as she appraised him from behind the table, while, under the combined pressure of Harrer’s first, appropriately intimidating, questions and the ‘vulnerability’ of standing in the centre of the room, this ‘native of the Nile’, who was ‘stinking of booze’, gave up any appearance of ‘self-confidence’, at which point the woman in command of the situation took over and let it be known ‘by way of a little warning’ that this was no place for playing ‘pig-in-a-poke’ and that they wouldn’t waste time on ‘pub-crawlers’, and that he should listen very carefully to what she said as she would say it only once. Let there be no misunderstanding, she announced, her face as cold as ice, ‘the purpose of our interrogation is to decide whether we should throw you to the authorities straight away or whether we have any use for you’, but that the only way he could persuade them to the latter opinion was by giving a fully detailed and entirely accurate account of the events of ‘that’ night. That was the only way, she raised her index finger, since accuracy and copiousness of detail were ‘an earnest of his intention’ to become a useful member of society, otherwise he could go before the judge, which meant prison, and in cases such as his, this meant for life. He had absolutely no desire to go to prison, the interrogated man answered uneasily, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, especially as Vulture — he pointed to Harrer — had promised him there would be no problems provided that he ‘dished the dirt’. He hadn’t come to give himself up, ‘he wasn’t born yesterday’, there was no need for threats, he had come of his own free will to confess everything and would take them through events line by line, because, he said, as he scratched at a healing bruise on his chin, ‘he knew the score’; they wanted policemen, and he was here because he was fed up with the Nile. We’ll see what we can do, Mrs Eszter replied with a severe dignity, but first they wanted to hear whether he had committed any crime so serious that ‘not God himself could save you from the full force of the law’, and that once he had told them everything, ‘word by word, line by line’ then, and only then, would she, the secretary to the council, be able to tell whether she was in a position to help.