Satantango

by László Krasznahorkai

  IV.

  The Work of the Spider I

  Turn the fire on!” said Kerekes, the farmer. Autumnal horse-flies were buzzing round the cracked lampshade, describing drowsy figures of eight in its weak light, time and again colliding with the filthy porcelain, so that after each dull little thud their bodies fell back into the magnetic paths they themselves had woven, to continue this endless cycle, albeit on a tight closed circuit until the light went out; but the compassionate hand that had the power to undertake such action was still supporting the unshaven face. The landlord’s ears were full of the sounds of the rain that never seemed to want to stop, and he was watching the horseflies through sleepy eyes, blinking and muttering: “Devil take the lot of you.” Halics was sitting in the corner by the door on an iron-framed if rather unsteady chair, his waterproof coat buttoned up to the chin, a coat that, if he wished to sit down at all, he had to raise to groin level because the fact was the rain and wind had not spared either him or his coat, disfiguring and softening them both, Halics’s whole body felt as though it had lost definition and, as for his coat, it had lost whatever resistance to water it once had nor could it protect him from the roaring cataract of fate, or, as he tended to say, “the rain of death in the heart,” a rain that beat, day and night, against both his withered heart and defenseless organs. The pool of water around his boots was growing every wider, the empty glass in his hand was growing heavier, and however he tried not to hear, there, behind him, his elbows propped on the so-called “billiards table” and his sightless eyes turned to the landlord, was Kerekes, slurping his beer slowly through his teeth, then greedily swallowing it with great glugs. “I said turn it on . . .” he repeated, then turned his head slightly to the right so he should not miss a single sound. The smell of mold rising from the floor at the corners of the room surrounded the vanguard cockroaches working their way down the back walls, with the main cockroach army following them to swarm across the oily floor. The landlord responded with an obscene gesture, meeting Halics’s watery eyes with a sly, conspiratorial smile, but hearing the farmer’s words of warning (“Don’t point, shit face!”) he shrank back in the chair with fright. Behind the tin-topped counter a poster spotted with lime bloomed at a crooked angle on the wall while on the far side, beyond the circle of light emanating from the lamp, next to a faded Coca-Cola ad stood an iron clothes-hook with a dusty forgotten hat and work-coat dangling from it, the coat stiff as an airborne statue; anyone glancing at it might have mistaken it for a hanged man. Kerekes started off in the direction of the landlord, an empty bottle in his hand. The floor creaked under him and he pitched slightly forward, his enormous body looming above everything else. For a moment he was like a bull springing over a fence: he seemed to occupy every available inch of space. Halics saw the landlord disappear behind the stockroom door and heard him quickly shoot the bolt and, frightened as he was, because something had actually happened, Halics took some consolation in realizing that, for once, he did not have to take shelter behind the towering sacks of artificial fertilizer that years ago had been piled one on top of another and had never been moved, or between rows of garden implements and containers of foul-smelling pigswill with his back up against the ice-cold steel door, and he even felt a certain flutter of joy, or maybe just a smidgeon of satisfaction at the thought that the master of all that store of glittering wine was now cowering behind locked doors, desperately waiting for some reassuring sound, his life threatened by the powerfully built farmer. “Another bottle!” Kerekes angrily demanded. He pulled a fistful of paper money from his pocket, but having moved too fast he dropped the money — which, after a moment of dignified drifting in the air, landed right next to his enormous boots. Because he was aware — if only briefly — of the rules governing the actions of other persons, the degree to which they were predictable or unpredictable, and knowing what he himself should most certainly do, Halics rose, waited a few seconds to see whether the farmer would bend down to retrieve the cash, cleared his throat, then went over, took out his own last few dimes and opened his palm. The coins clinked as they ran all over the place, then — as the very last one finally settled — he knelt down on the floor to gather them up. “Pick up my hundred too,” Kerekes boomed at him and Halics, knowing the ways of the world (“ . . . I can see right through you!”), silently, obediently, slavishly, picked up the money and handed it over, all the time brimming with hatred. “It was just the denomination he got wrong! . . .” he said to himself, still frightened. “Just the denomination.” Then, at a gruff question from the farmer (“So, where are you?!”) he sprang to his feet, brushed his knees down and hopefully, since he couldn’t be certain whether the farmer was addressing the landlord or him, leaned against the bar at a safe distance from Kerekes, who — was it possible? — appeared to be hesitating, so that when Halics finally spoke his frail, hardly audible voice (“Well, how long do we have to wait?”) reverberated in the silence and could not be retracted. Nevertheless, obliged as he was to be standing near someone as physically powerful as Kerekes and having distanced himself as far as he could from the words he had so carelessly uttered, he felt he had forged some vague comradeship with Kerekes, the only sort of which he was capable, not only because of his easily wounded self-regard but because his very cells protested against the possibility that he should behave differently from any other coward: terrified complicity was the only available option. By the time the farmer slowly turned to him the obligation to remain loyal, something that had long been part of Halics’s character, had given way to something else: he felt oddly moved in discovering that a stray remark of his should have hit the mark. It was so unexpected. He wasn’t prepared to find that his own voice — the voice in which he had just spoken, a voice not in the least prepared — could deflect and, to some degree, neutralize the farmer’s clear surprise, so he quickly, as a sign of immediate and unconditional withdrawal, added: “Though of course, it’s nothing to do with me . . .” Kerekes was beginning to lose his temper again. He lowered his head and registered the fact that there before him on the counter stood a row of washed wine glasses: he had just raised his fist when, at that precise moment, the landlord emerged from the stockroom and stood on the threshold. He rubbed his eyes and leaned against the doorframe, the two minutes spent at the back of his emporium being sufficient to wipe away his sudden and, when you came to consider it, ridiculous, panic (“How aggressive he is! Damn animal!”), so the damage to his self-esteem could be only skin-deep after all, nothing really serious, and, if the big farmer did get under his skin, it was simply “another stone dropped down a bottomless well.” “Another bottle!” Kerekes demanded, and put the money down on the counter. And seeing how the landlord was still keeping a careful distance, added, “Don’t be afraid, you idiot. I won’t hurt you. Just stop pointing.” By the time he returned to his chair at the “billiard table” and sat down carefully for fear of someone pulling the chair out from under him, the landlord’s chin was propped on his other hand, his whey-colored foxy eyes clouded over with uncertainty and a sort of tangible longing, his fingers long, refined, and polished with long years of laboring on the periphery of that same palm, his shoulders fallen in, his belly a conspicuous paunch, not a muscle of his body moving apart from the toes inside his well-worn shoes: all in the close warmth of perpetual servility — the kind of servility that renders the skin torpid and the palm sweaty — shining from his white-as-chalk face. Then the lamp that had been hanging motionless from the ceiling began to sway and its narrow aureole of light — no bigger than a slice of bread — that left most of the ceiling and the tops of the walls in shadow, offering only enough light to see the three men, the cookies, the dried noodles for soup, the counter covered with wine glasses and bottles of pálinka, the chairs, the dead flies — gave the bar the air of a ship in a storm in the early evening dusk. Kerekes opened the bottle, dragged the glass over with his free hand, and sat there for some minutes without moving, bottle in one hand, glass in the other as if he h
ad forgotten what to do next. Now that everything had gone quiet, in the absolute dark of his blindness he felt as if he were deaf too, that everything around him had become weightless, right down to his own body, his ass, his arms, and the legs spread wide below him, and that any capacity he might have had in the realms of touch, or taste, or smell, had also deserted him, leaving nothing but the throbbing of blood and the calm workings of his organs to disturb his utter lack of consciousness, the mysterious core of his anxiety having withdrawn into its own infernal darkness, into the forbidden territories of the imagination, from whence it was obliged, time and again, to break free. Halics didn’t know what to make of the situation, and shifted here and there in his excitement because he sensed Kerekes was watching him. It would have been too presumptuous to interpret his unexpected immobility as a gradually unfolding form of invitation; on the contrary, he suspected that the dead eyes turned towards him constituted a threat, but however he racked his brains he couldn’t remember having committed any offense for which he ought to bear immediate responsibility, all the more so since in the hard hours, when “a man of sorrows” like him was plunged deep into the liberating waters of self-knowledge, he had confessed to himself that his comfortable life, which had slipped uneventfully into his fifty-second year, was as insignificant in the great rank of competing lives as cigarette smoke in a burning train. This brief, unlocated sense of guilt (was it in fact guilt at all? since if it was true, as the saying goes, that “once the flame of guilt has gone out it’s no more than a dead match,” the minimal light remaining is easily identified with some problem in the conscience) vanished just at the moment it might have penetrated his soul more deeply, which had entered on the next phase of hysteria, affecting the roof of his mouth, his throat, his gullet and stomach, all because of something he had prepared himself for far earlier, that being the arrival of the Schmidts and the settling of what was “due to him.” The cold bar only made the situation worse, and a single glance at the wine-racks piled behind the landlord’s low stool set his hysterical imagination spinning into a whirlpool that threatened to swallow him completely, especially now that, finally, he heard the glug of wine being poured into the farmer’s glass, and couldn’t resist looking, some greater power drawing his eyes to the tiny momentary pearls of poured wine. The landlord listened, his eyes cast down, as Halics’s boots creaked across the floor and didn’t even look up when he felt his sour breath, feeling no desire at all to confront the beads of perspiration on Halics’s face, because he knew that, for the third time that evening, he’d give in. “Look friend,” Halics carefully cleared his throat, “just a glass, just one!” and he gave the landlord a perfectly sincere look, even raising a finger. “The Schmidts will be here, you know, very soon. . . .” He raised the newly filled glass with closed eyes, very slowly, and drank in small sips, his head tipped back and, once the glass was empty, he kept a little in his mouth so the very last drop might dribble down his throat. “Neat little wine . . . ,” he smacked his lips in confusion as he gently, somewhat indecisively, put the glass down on the counter like one living in hope right down to the very last moment, then slowly turned away and grumbled to himself (“Pig swill!”) before ambling back to his chair. Kerekes leaned his heavy head on the green baize of the “billiards table,” the landlord, who was bathed in lamplight, scratched his numb ass then started flapping at the spider webs with his dishcloth. “Halics, listen! You hear me? . . . You! What’s going on out there?” Halics stared uncomprehending, straight in front of him. “Where?” The landlord repeated it. “Oh, in the cultural center? Well,” he scratched his head, “nothing in particular.” “OK, but what’s playing there now?” “Ach,” Halics waved, “I’ve seen it at least three times. Actually I just took my wife and left her there and came straight over.” The landlord sat back on his stool, leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette. “At least tell me what film they’re showing tonight!” “That whatsitsname . . . Scandal in Soho.” “Really?” nodded the landlord. The table beside Halics made a creaking noise and the rotting wood of the bar gave a slow sigh like the quiet easy movement of an old carriage wheel over the buzzing chorus of horseflies: it conjured the past but it also spoke of perpetual decay. And as the wood creaked the wind outside, like a helpless hand searching through a dusty book for some vanished main clause, kept asking the same question time and again hoping to give a “cheap imitation of a proper answer” to the banks of solid mud, to establish some common dynamic between tree, air and earth, and to seek through invisible cracks in the door and walls the first and original sound, of Halics belching. The farmer was snoring on the “billiards table,” the saliva trickling from his open mouth. Suddenly, like a distant rumble on the horizon, from a vague shape that is slowly getting closer, though you can’t quite tell whether it’s a herd of cows being driven home, a school bus, or the sound of a marching military band, from the deep pit of Kerekes’s stomach rose a quite unclassifiable grumble that eventually reached his lips and issued in words like “. . . .bitch” and, “really” and “or” and “more” though that was all they could make out. The grumbling culminated in a single movement, a blow aimed at someone or something. His glass tipped over and the pool of wine on the baize cloth assumed the shape of a flattened dog before absorbing various other shapes into itself as it soaked in, ending up in a form of uncertain character (but had it soaked in? or had it simply run between the strands of cloth to lie on the surface of the riven boards to establish a series of isolated and conjoined pools . . . though none of this was of the least significance as far as Halics was concerned because . . . ). In any case Halics made a hissing a noise, “Damn your drunk mug!” and shook his fist in the direction of Kerekes, helpless with rage, as if not wanting to believe his eyes, turning to the landlord to mutter a furious explanation: “Now the bastard spills the stuff!” The latter gave Halics a long significant look before finally glancing over at the farmer, not in fact directly at him, but in his general direction, just enough to register the damage. He appraised the inexperienced Halics with a supercilious smile then, giving several little nods, changed the subject. “What a huge ox of a man, a real animal, eh?” Halics stared in confusion at the mocking light glimmering under the landlord’s half closed eyelids, shook his head and took a long look at the bull-like figure of the prostate farmer. “What do you think?” he numbly asked. “How much does a beast like him need to eat?” “Eat!?” the landlord snorted. “He doesn’t eat, he feeds!” Halics went over to the bar and leaned against it. “He eats half a pig at a sitting. You believe me” “Sure, I believe you.” Kerekes gave a loud snore and that shut them up. They looked at the enormous, immovable body, the big bloodshot head and the muddy boots protruding from under the shadowy reaches of the “billiards table” in astonishment and fear, the way people take stock of a sleeping predator, doubly assured of safety by the bars and by sleep itself. Halics was seeking — and indeed had found! — a minute or a second’s worth of comradeship with the landlord, if only in the way a caged hyena and a freely circling vulture discover a warm, mutual unselfconscious partnership that welcomes any disaster . . . But they were awakened from this reverie by an enormous clap, as if the sky was cracking open above them. Immediately after the bar was lit by a great flash, so you could practically smell the lightning. “That was really close,” Halics would have remarked, but at the same time someone started beating powerfully at the door. The landlord leapt to attention but didn’t immediately rush over because, for a moment, he was sure there must be some connection between the lightning and the knocking at the door. He only gathered himself together and set to open up when whoever was outside started bellowing. “So it’s you and . . . ?” The landlord’s back was in the way so Halics saw nothing at first, then two big heavy boots became visible then a windcheater, and finally Kelemen’s puffy face hove into sight, his soaked driver’s hat perched on top. Halics stared at him, his eyes wide. The new arrival cursed as he shook his coat free of water and threw it angrily
on top of the stove before turning on the landlord who was still struggling with the bolt and had his back to him. “Are you all deaf in here! There I am trying to wrestle with that bloody door, almost struck by lightning, and nobody comes to open it!” The landlord retreated behind the counter, poured a glass of pálinka and pushed it in front of the old man. “Given the noise of the thunder it’s really not that surprising . . .” the landlord answered by way of excuse. He was fiercely scrutinizing the newcomer, trying quickly to guess what had brought him here in the rain, why the glass was trembling in his hand, and what he was hiding. But neither he nor Halics asked him anything yet, because there was another great crack in the sky and all the rain seemed to fall at once, in one great sack-full, battering at the roof. The old man tried as best he could to wring the water out of his broadcloth cap, pushed it back into shape, replaced it on his head and, with a careworn look, threw back the pálinka. Now, for the first time, since searching for the lost track in dense darkness, a track no one could remember using (the track covered in weeds and rank grass) the excited profiles of his two horses flashed before him as they, inexplicably, kept glancing back at their helpless but determined master, their tails nervously twitching, and he heard again their heavy panting over the squeak and creak of the cart as it rattled over dangerous potholes, and he saw himself standing in the driver’s seat, then holding onto the reins, up to his ankles in mud, leaning against the driving wind in his face, and it was only now he really believed what had happened, that, but for Irimias and Petrina, he’d never have set off, because there was “no power greater than theirs” that could have forced him, because he felt quite certain now that it was true because he saw himself in the shadow of their great power, like a common foot-soldier on the battlefield when he senses rather than hears the order given by his commanding officer and goes about his duties without anyone having told him to do so. And so the images moved silently past his eyes in ever more stilted sequence, as if everything man might hold dear and consider vital to protect existed as part of some independent, indissoluble system, and while one’s memory was still functional enough to furnish it with a degree of certainty and bring into existence its lightly fleeting now, as well as validating the living strands of the rules of the system in the open field of events, one was forced to bridge the gap between memory and life not with a sense of freedom but rather bound by the cramped satisfaction simply of being the possessor of the memory; and so at this stage, given the first opportunity of bringing these things to mind, he felt the terror in everything that had happened, though pretty soon he would begin to cling to the memory with an ever greater jealous possessiveness, however often “in the few years still remaining to him” the memory recurred, right down to the last time he conjured these images while leaning out of the tiny north-facing window of the farmhouse at the most miserable time of night, alone and sleepless, waiting for dawn. “Where have you just come from?” the landlord eventually asked. “From home.” Halics looked surprised and took a step nearer. “But that’s at least half a day’s journey!” The visitor silently lit a cigarette. “On foot?” asked the landlord in uncertainty. “Of course not. Horse. Cart. The old track.” He had been warmed through by the drink now and he looked at each face in turn, blinking a little, but he hadn’t yet told them what he wanted to tell them, nor did he know how to begin, because the moment wasn’t quite right, or, to put it more precisely, he was unable to decide about the moment because he didn’t know what it was he was hoping for, and even if it was plain to him that the sense of vacancy and tedium radiated by the very walls was only an appearance, and even if this spot was to be the site of as yet invisible but therefore all the more feverish forces in the coming hours, and even if the wild cries of the party that would soon engulf them were already audible but not yet present, he was, nevertheless, expecting far more than this, a more feverish sense of anticipation than the landlord and Halics were able to offer, and so he felt fate was letting him down badly by presenting him with just these two people: a landlord from whom “a veritable chasm” divided him, because the people he regarded as the “traveling public,” or, more strictly as the generic “Passenger” was, to the landlord merely “a guest . . .”; and Halics, a “flat tire” of a man to whom expressions such as “discipline, firmness of purpose, fighting spirit and reliability” meant nothing now, nor ever had. The landlord was tensely watching the shadows in the nape of the driver’s neck, his breathing slow and careful. Halics meanwhile was convinced — at least until the driver started his story — that “someone must have died.” News quickly spread on the estate and the half hour it took before the landlord returned was plenty enough for Halics, who was in touching distance, secretly to examine what was really behind the labels on those bottles on the shelf, the ones saying RIZLING, a name that was filled with various associations for him, and there was even enough time, in the presence of a sleeping figure and another vaguely nodding off, to make a lightning quick test of his long stated hypothesis that when wine was watered down the color of the mixture — because it was quite a different matter he had in mind! — bore an easily confusable likeness to the wine’s original color. At the same time as he successfully concluded his inspection Mrs. Halics, who was on her way to the bar, thought she saw a star falling from the sky above the mill. She stopped dead in her tracks and put her hand to her heart, but however keenly and stubbornly she scanned the sky, a sky that seemed to be full of ringing bells, she was obliged to admit that it was probably just her eyes sparkling with the unexpected excitement — nevertheless, the uncertainty, the mere possibility of a decisive event as against the oppressive sight of the desolate landscape, pressed on her so heavily that she changed her mind, turned back to the house, took out her ragged Bible from under the pile of the crisply ironed washing, and, with an increasing sense of guilt, set off again down the metalled road by the sign that used to bear the name of the estate, and walked the hundred and seven steps or so to the bar against the driving rain while her mind sought to grasp the developing state of affairs. In order to gain a little time, because in her agitated state the words were merely clanging round in her head, and because she wanted to convey her message (“we are living in apocalyptic times!”) with a blinding, irresistible clarity, she stopped at the bar door and waited until a phrase came to her, only throwing open the door and crossing the threshold once she felt sure it was the right phrase, the right word, at which point she entered, to the astonishment of all within, with the single cry of RESURRECTION! a word whose power was such as to increase the spellbinding effect of her entrance, the term itself being enough to demand attention. Hearing it the farmer’s head snapped back in fear, the driver leapt from his place as if he had been stabbed, and the landlord started back so violently and so suddenly that he hit his head against the wall and was knocked semi-conscious as a result. Soon after that they recognized Mrs. Halics. The landlord couldn’t stop himself shouting at her (“For God’s sake, Mrs. Halics, what in heaven’s name is the matter with you!?”) then attempted to screw the broken bolt back in the door. Halics was overcome with embarrassment and tried to drag his over-excitedly gabbling wife over to the nearest chair (which was no easy matter: “Come along with you, for God’s sake, look at the rain coming in!”) attempting to calm her by simply nodding to everything she said, her speech being a blend of high pathos and whimpering terror that ended only when Mrs. Halics noticed the landlord and the driver giving each other a mocking look and cried out in fury: “It’s nothing to laugh at! There’s nothing in the least bit funny about it!” at which point Halics finally managed to push her into the chair next to his at the corner table. There she retreated into a wounded silence, clutching the Bible to her bosom, looking over the heads of the others into a kind of heavenly haze, her eyes misting over with a blissful sense of certainty derived from above. In her own mind she stood, straight as a post, high above a magnetic field of bent heads and backs, the proud unassailable place she occupied in the inn, a space
she was unwilling to vacate, like a vent in the closed bar, a vent through which foul air could escape so that numbing, frozen, poisonous drafts from outside might rush in and take its place. In the tense silence the continual buzzing of the horseflies was the only audible sound, that and the constant rain beating down in the distance, and, uniting the two, the ever more frequent scritch-scratch of the bent acacia trees outside, and the strange nightshift work of the bugs in the table legs and in various parts of the counter whose irregular pulse measured out the small parcels of time, apportioning the narrow space into which a word, a sentence or a movement might perfectly fit. The entire end-of-October night was beating with a single pulse, its own strange rhythm sounding through trees and rain and mud in a manner beyond words or vision; a vision present in the low light, in the slow passage of darkness, in the blurred shadows, in the working of tired muscles; in the silence, in its human subjects, in the undulating surface of the metalled road; in the hair moving to a different beat than do the dissolving fibers of the body; growth and decay on their divergent paths; all these thousands of echoing rhythms, this confusing clatter of night noises, all parts of an apparently common stream, that is the attempt to forget despair; though behind things other things appear as if by mischief, and once beyond the power of the eye they no longer hang together. So with the door left open as if for ever, with the lock that will never open. There is a chasm, a crevice. The landlord, having discovered it was a waste of energy trying to find a firm patch in the rotten door, threw the bolt aside and made do with a wedge then sat back on his stool with a curse (“The gap’s still a gap,” he eventually muttered, resigned to the fact), so that his body at least might get a rest and so be able to resist the spiraling anxiety that — as he well knew — would soon overtake him. Because it was all in vain: he no sooner felt a sudden and violent desire to be revenged on Mrs. Halics than the desire was overtaken by a precipitous descent into despondency. He took a look around the tables, estimated how much wine and pálinka there was left, then got up and pulled the storeroom door closed behind him. Now that no one could see him, he gave his rage free rein, shaking his fist and making terrifying faces, keenly aware of the smell of rust (“the smell of love . . .” as he often had occasion to term it when the Horgos girls had pitched their headquarters there) and running his eye straight down the line of untouched goods as he always did when wanting to think over some pressing problem, toward the window that was protected from potential roadside thieves by two iron bars of a finger’s thickness each, as well as a dense weave of cobwebs, then back along the sacks of flour, past the high piles of foodstuff right down to the little desk where he kept his business books, his notes, his tobacco and various personal belongings, and finally back to the small window where — having already made a discourteous remark regarding the Creator who was trying to ruin his life with these “filthy spiders,” without feeling any particularly keen emotion either way — he turned to his right and, stepping over a pile of spilt grain, soon reached the iron door again. It was all nonsense: he didn’t believe in any kind of resurrection and was happy to leave such humbug to Mrs. Halics who was well acquainted with humbug of all sorts, though one might of course feel a certain uneasiness if it suddenly turned out that someone thought dead should turn out to be alive. He’d had no reason at that time to doubt what the Horgos kid had firmly stated, he even drew him aside to “interrogate him” more intensely about the details; and, though some of the smaller details made him question the pillars on which the story was built because they were “not as solid as they might be” he never once assumed the story itself to be false. Because, he asked himself, what reason would the Horgos kid have for telling such a whopping lie? He himself, of course, was firmly of the opinion that the kid was as rotten as could be but no one could tell him the boy was capable of making up such a story without any outside help, or indeed encouragement. But, at the same time, he was pretty certain that (while someone might indeed have seen the dead in town), death was death, and that’s it. He wasn’t in the least surprised: it’s just what you’d expect of Irimiás. As far as he was concerned nothing was too strange to be believed about that lousy vagrant, because it was perfectly clear that he and his companion were a pair of filthy scoundrels. He resolved that whenever and however they arrived he would stand quite firm: the wine had to be paid for. In the long run it wasn’t his problem — they might be ghosts for all he knew — but anyone that wants to drink here has to pay up. Why should he be the loser? He hadn’t “worked his fingers to the bone” all his life; he hadn’t set up this business by sheer hard slog so that “a bunch of idle tramps” should swig his wine for free. People didn’t sell on credit, and grand gestures — that kind of thing — were not his style. In any case he did not think it impossible that Irimiás really had been hit by a car. Why? Hadn’t anyone but him ever heard of a case of apparent death? So someone had succeeded in dragging people back into this miserable life, so what!? In his opinion, this was not beyond the ability of modern medicine, though it was an act of considerable carelessness, if so. One way or the other, he wasn’t interested; he was not the kind of man to run scared of a figure suspected to be dead. He sat down at his desk and, having blown the dust off his account book, leafed through it, pulled out a piece of paper and a blunt much-chewed pencil stub and, feverishly adding up the figures on the last page, scribbled some meaningless numbers while incoherently mumbling to himself: