The Melancholy of Resistance

by Krasznahorkai, László

  It wasn’t how things turned out, nor could it have been, since Mrs Eszter knew very well whom she was dealing with and thought it natural that she, who—as her friend, the chief of police, daily whispered in her ear—was, ‘in terms of height and body-weight, positively gigantic … not to mention the other things’, should, with her inborn sense of superiority and notorious intolerance of opposition, flatten the resistance of stubborn Mrs Plauf. After sugaring her up with a few crooned ‘my dears’, she adopted a ringing manly tone and proclaimed that while she herself was in absolutely no doubt about the time of night, it was of vital importance that she should speak to her then and there on ‘a private matter that could not be deferred’, and thereupon taking advantage of the brief and predictable paralysis suffered by the shocked Mrs Plauf, she simply bundled her through the gate, stormed up the stairs and, bobbing her head out of habit (‘I wouldn’t want to give it a painful crack’), passed straight through the open door into the hall where, to divert attention from the urgency of her visit, she engaged in little formalities about the ‘excellent situation’ of the flat, the ‘ingenious pattern’ of the hallway carpet and the general ‘enviably refined good taste’—a taste of whose ‘common vulgarity’ she was convinced by the time she had darted a few glances about as she hung up her coat. It would be hard to state with any certainty whether the ‘diverting her attention’ ploy truly represented the precise nature of her intentions, since the fact was that her aim—having regard, that is, to the urgency of her need to spend a quarter of an hour or so with Valuska’s mother before the day was over, so that, if they chanced to meet the following day, she could refer to the visit—might have been achieved in any number of ways; however, despite this, she did not after all choose the solution closest to hand (which was, in fact, immediately to sit down in one of those repulsive armchairs and steer the conversation round to ‘that desire for renovation and rejuvenation so evident in the country at large and, in this context, the now-in-every-way-more-energetic work of the keenly enthusiastic local women’s committee’), for though she had made allowance for it, the cosy comfiness, the stolid air of inactivity, the treacly prettiness of this ‘filthy little viper’s nest’ had such a strong effect on her that, suppressing her repulsion with a great effort born out of tactfulness, she was constrained to examine every item in her hostess’s armoury with the gre-a-test of care. Accompanied by Mrs Plauf, who in her fury and confusion hardly dared to breathe a word, but ran along behind her, red-faced, treading on her heels and readjusting each disturbed item, she ran her eyes carefully over each nook and cranny of the flat, stifling under its load of bric-à-brac, and, with feigned appreciation (since ‘it wasn’t yet time to lay one’s cards on the table’), she deployed her booming alto voice to declare, ‘Yes, undoubtedly, women lend meaning to the lifeless objects around them; it is women, and only women, who can provide what we call that individual charm,’ while struggling desperately with the ever more intense temptation to crush one of those little knick-knacks in her enormous palm, to snap it as one would the neck of a chicken, since, damn it all, these comb racks and lace doilies, that swan’s-neck ashtray, the velveteen ‘Persian’ carpet, the ridiculously wispy tulle curtains and, behind the glass of the showcase, those straggling sentimental novels with their hot, sticky, airless contents, most graphically demonstrated to her where the world had got to with its petty unbridled indulgence in ‘idle pleasures and feeble desires’. She saw and made a mental note of everything, nothing escaped her attention, and taking it all in, having summoned all her self-control, she tortured herself further by taking a bitter delight in breathing in the scent-polluted air of the flat, which reminded her so precisely of ‘the sickeningly dainty pong of doll’s-houses’ and which, even a mile away, eloquently proclaimed the pitiable condition of its inhabitant, it was a stink from which she shrank, especially as, even on the threshold, it induced in her—or so she was wont to remark with withering sarcasm to the chief of police whenever she returned from one of her informal visits following her election—an earnest desire to vomit. Whether it was just her tendency to mockery or a genuine case of nausea, her friend could be quite certain that she was being subjected to no ordinary trials and tribulations, for ever since ‘the spirit of communal will had finally been recovered’ sufficiently to elevate her from the position of leader of the local male-voice choir (a post which occasioned her some humiliation and one whose demands were relieved only by that so-called ‘exclusive repertoire’ of marches, work songs and odes to spring) to president of the women’s committee, a figurehead of iron will, she had had to fritter her days away (‘hours at a time’) in such flats, if only to demonstrate to herself, again and again, that what she had suspected all along was in fact true beyond the shadow of a doubt. For clearly as she saw that it was precisely in such debilitating circumstances—among over-sweetened preserves and fluffy eiderdowns, among rugs with their fringes combed straight and armchairs protected by tightly knotted covers—that every powerful urge came to grief; that it was in this fatal slough—populated by those who considered themselves to be the cream of local society, who in their ridiculous house slippers devoured equally ridiculous operettas and treated simple healthier folk with contempt—that each decent impulse sank to oblivion; she understood the phenomenon all too well, and saw that despite, for example, the months of work following the presidential launch of the epoch-making campaign for renewal, the movement had unfortunately been frustrated. To be honest it was no more than she had expected so she wasn’t really surprised when this fine society of parasites, saturated by their own sense of self-worth, coolly rejected her carefully considered arguments, since behind the eternal excuses (such as, for example, ‘A clean-up in December? Perhaps later when it’s time for proper spring-cleaning …’), Mrs Eszter saw straight to the heart of their opposition, understanding that their impotence and craven servility sprang from an unreasonable, though, to them, justified, fear of all enterprise that aimed at general renewal, a renewal which, to them, might look like general decay, for in all passionate espousals of the new, people were liable to detect traces of an equally passionate drift towards chaos, and—quite rightly—suspect that the powers unleashed, instead of protecting that which was irrecoverably dead and buried, would smash it to pieces in the good cause of replacing the featureless boredom of their selfish lives with ‘the elevating passion of communal action’. One couldn’t deny that in this evaluation of the unusual and anarchic events of the immediate past—her confidant, the captain, and one or two right-minded people excepted—she probably stood alone in the town, but this gave her no cause for concern, nor did she think it necessary to reconsider her position, because something whispered to her that ‘the victory that justified all’ would not be long delayed. As to the question of what this victory would consist of, she could not have answered it in one or two simple sentences, but her faith was so firm that however resistant or numerous ‘these refined coteries of slippered old pantaloons’ might be she would not be cowed, for not only had she really nothing to fear from them, but she knew full well that the true enemy—and this was why this battle for hearts and minds had become such a personal struggle for her—was György Eszter himself, a man generally regarded as an eccentric hermit living in absolute isolation, but in fact merely sickly and lazy, Eszter, her semi-respectable husband-in-name, who, unlike her, ‘had no record whatsoever of involvement in civic affairs’—who had attained an ambiguous celebrity in town by spending years lying in bed so that (‘let us say’) once a week he could take a peek out of his window … Could he be the true enemy? He was more than that: for Mrs Eszter he was both ‘the hopeless and insurmountable walls of hell’, and, at the same time, her only hope of maintaining her well-earned place among the most influential citizens, in other words a snare, the perfect, faultless trap whose effectiveness it was vain to doubt, one she could neither escape nor wreck. Because, now, as always, Eszter continued to be the key to the operation, the decisive link in the
chain of the fulfilment of her high ambition, the very man who, years ago, when, owing to what he called his ‘back problems’, gave up the directorship of the local school of music, told her quite simply and with boundless cynicism that he ‘no longer required her household services’, and she had had to dig deep into their savings to rent herself a flat by the marketplace, the very man who, to compound his deed—as an act of revenge, for what else could it be?—abandoned such few commitments as they had shared, and resigned his post as director of the town’s orchestra, because, apparently, as she was to hear from others, he was no longer interested in anything but music and did not wish to take up his time with other things although Mrs Eszter, if anyone, could have told the world what ear-splittingly false notes he jangled out on that del-i-ber-at-ely out-of-tune piano, only, of course, if and when he could bring himself to rouse that body of his, enfeebled as it was by his habit of lounging about, and extricate himself from his monstrous piles of soft cushions and travelling rugs. When she thought back on all those years of endless humiliation, she would happily have given anything to have taken a handy axe and chopped her insufferable husband into tiny pieces there where he lay, but she knew very well that this was the one expedient not even remotely open to her since she had to admit that without Eszter the town would remain closed to her, and that whatever she set her mind on she would continually be running up against him. Explaining their separation by reference to her husband’s need for solitude and quiet working conditions, she was forced to maintain the appearance of marriage, and to suppress even the thought of a fiercely desired divorce; worse still she had to resign herself to the fact that with the assistance of Eszter’s disciple and favourite, the terminally lunatic Valuska, Mrs Plauf’s degenerate son from her first marriage, her husband—at first secretly but later quite openly so the whole town knew about it—had taken to doing all the washing, including the ‘filthy underclothes’. The situation looked undeniably grave but Mrs Eszter was not to be defeated: though she didn’t know whether personal revenge or ‘the struggle for the common good’ was the more appropriate, or whether it was more important to pay back Eszter (‘for everything!’) or to render her own rather unstable ‘position’ impregnable, of one thing she was certain, that this unfortunate state of affairs could not last for ever, and that one day, perhaps even in the not-too-distant future, once she had achieved a fully deserved power and attained high enough rank, she could finally settle the hash of this pathetic scoundrel who was ‘determined’ to make a laughing stock of her and make her life a misery. And she had sound enough reasons for thinking that things might turn out like this, because (for it wasn’t simply a case of, ‘It must be so, therefore it will be so’) the office of president not only presented the opportunity of ‘a free hand and the unfettered exercise of power’, but was also an encouraging sign of her growing independence from him—not to mention the fact that since she had discovered how to gain the support of the obstinate bourgeoisie for the drastic measures envisaged by the committee and, at the same time, re-established her useful connection with Eszter, her self-confidence, which had been sadly lacking, was now boundless and she was fully convinced that she was on the right road and that no one could stop her marching directly towards her goal … The plan was foolproof after all, and, naturally, like all ‘strokes of genius’, simple as pie, it was just that, as is usually the case, it was hard work achieving that unique and peculiarly appropriate resolution; of course she had clearly seen, right from the beginning when the movement was first advertised, that indifference and opposition to it could be overcome only by bringing Eszter ‘into play’; if only he could be forced into taking part, persuaded into the figurehead role, the programme represented by the empty slogan of A TIDY YARD, AN ORDERLY HOUSE, which had been up till then a contemptible failure, might form the basis of a wide-ranging, genuine and powerful initiative. Yes, but how? That was the question. It took her weeks, nay months before, having discarded a whole range of impractical methods from simple persuasion to force of arms, she stumbled on the one sure way of putting him on the spot, but ever since then, once she had realized that her scheme depended on no more than ‘that soft creature, Valuska’ and his mother, Mrs Plauf, who was commonly known to be estranged from and therefore all the more passionately adored by him, such an utter sense of calm had descended on her that nothing or no one could shake her out of it; furthermore, now that she was sitting among the spongy carpets and overpolished furniture of this tiny (‘… yet so very buxom’) woman, she was vaguely amused to see how, every time she dropped and scattered ash from her cigarette, or when she approvingly tasted the cherry preserve remaining on the table, Mrs Plauf’s cheeks ‘absolutely blazed’. She was delighted to observe that the helpless fury of her hostess (‘She’s frightened of me!’ she decided with some satisfaction) was slowly overcoming her earlier indignation, and so, glancing round the room stuffed with plants which made her feel she was in some meadow or yard full of loose clods of grass, she switched back to her low murmur—for no other reason now than to amuse herself—to remark by way of acknowledgement: ‘Well, that’s how it is. It’s every townee’s desire to bring nature indoors. We all feel like that, Piri, love.’ But Mrs Plauf did not answer, she did the least she was constrained to do and simply gave a little nod of her head, which was a signal clear enough for Mrs Eszter to comprehend that she should get on to her business. Of course, whether Mrs Plauf did or did not agree to play her part in the matter—since she couldn’t have guessed that she had already said ‘yes’ by failing to prevent the invasion of her flat, the sheer presence of her visitor being the whole point—her willingness or otherwise was of little importance; nevertheless, having painstakingly described the situation for her (in the manner of ‘don’t for a moment think, my dear, it is I who want him, no, it’s the town that wants Eszter, but to persuade a man as busy as everyone knows he is to act is so hard only your nice gentle son can do it …’), and having addressed her in the friendliest manner possible while looking directly into her eyes, she was undeniably and unpleasantly surprised by the immediate rejection, because she could see perfectly well it wasn’t that relations between Valuska and Mrs Plauf ‘had totally broken down some years ago’, and that it was Mrs Plauf’s ‘parental duty to distance herself from anything to do with Valuska, though one could well imagine what pain and bitterness one suffered having to say this of one’s own son who did not lack a heart but was distinctly ungrateful and useless’, but that all her suppressed fury at her feeble helplessness had been concentrated into this ‘no’ which would serve to pay Mrs Eszter back for the indignity of the last few minutes, for the fact she was small and weak while Mrs Eszter was large and powerful, that, however she would have liked to deny it, she had been forced to admit that it was her son who was ‘a lodger at Hagelmayer’s’, her son who was a village idiot whose abilities barely qualified him to be newsboy for the local post office—and that she had to own up to all this before a stranger disapproved of by all her friends. There was enough evidence for her to have grasped this anyway, and seeing that Mrs Plauf, ‘this midget’, was quite impotent before her, as if only by way of recompense for the fact she had been forced to sit for almost twenty minutes and endure ‘that infuriating smile’ and those mock-pious looks of hers, she leapt from the deep apple-green armchair with a contemptuous aside to the effect that she must be going, cut her way through the thick foliage, accidentally brushing a tiny sampler from the wall with her shoulder, and, without another word, stubbed her cigarette out in a never-before-used ashtray and snatched down her enormous black fake-fur coat. For while she was perfectly capable of coolly appraising a situation, knowing she could no longer be surprised by anything, once anyone dared say no to her, as Mrs Plauf did just now, her gorge immediately rose and she practically burst with gall, for she had no clear idea what to do in the circumstances. The fury simmered in her, the anger consumed her, so much so that when the neurotically hand-wringing Mrs Plauf addressed a question to her
just as she was snapping the last steel clip of her coat into place (her eyes flashing, her lips tight, neck craned back, staring at the ceiling), something to the effect that she was ‘terribly anxious’ (‘… This evening … when I got back from my sisters’ house … and … I hardly recognized the town … Has anybody explained why the streetlamps are no longer lit? … This sort of thing never used to happen before’), she practically screamed at the terrified housewife: ‘You have every cause for anxiety. We are on the threshold of a more searching, more honest, more open society. There are new times just around the corner, my dear Piri.’ At these significant words, and more particularly because Mrs Eszter emphasized the last sentence by jabbing an admonitory finger in the air, the colour quite drained from Mrs Plauf’s face; but none of this rendered her any kind of satisfaction, because, however pleasant it was to see this and to know that the little ‘bag of tits’ would persist in hoping for one word, for one reassuring answer from her unintentionally provoked visitor all the way down the stairs, right until she had closed the gate behind her, and however clearly she realized that she should have accepted this as recompense, the wound to her self-esteem administered by Mrs Plauf, this ‘no’, like a poisoned arrow stuck in a tree, continued to quiver for an unaccountable length of time and she was forced shamefully to admit that what should have been merely an unpleasant sting (for she had after all convincingly accomplished her goal and this tiny setback was of little importance) was slowly intensifying to an ever more acute pain. If Mrs Plauf had agreed enthusiastically, as one had every right to expect she would, she would have remained an easily manipulated tool, unaware of the clash of events above her, events which, in any case, were of no account to her, and her insignificant role in them would, quite properly, have come to an end, but no (‘But no!’), with this rejection her superfluous being was now elevated to the role of what amounted to anonymous partner; this dwarfish nonentity (dwarfish, that is to say, compared with Mrs Eszter’s unquestionably intenser reality) had, so to speak, dragged her down to her own safely ignorable level, so that she might revenge herself on her visitor’s radiant air of superiority, which she could neither tolerate nor resist. And while of course this helpless sense of injury could not last for ever, it wouldn’t have been proper to claim, after all this, that she was quite simply over ‘the business’, nor did she claim it when later—at home by that time—she recounted the meeting to her friend, though she did perhaps skate over certain details, and remarked only on how ‘the wonderful, breathtakingly fresh air’, which revived her immediately she set foot outside Mrs Plauf’s stifling stairwell, had had ‘the most beneficial effect’ on her judgement, so that by the time she had reached Nadabán’s butcher’s shop, she had recovered her earlier equanimity, was once again decisive, invulnerable, absolutely calm and full of confidence. And this—the decisive effect of sixteen degrees of frost on her frayed nerves—was certainly no exaggeration, for Mrs Eszter genuinely belonged to that class of people who ‘sicken with spring and collapse in summer’, for whom enervating warmth, incapacitating heat and the sun blazing in the sky were a source of terror, confining her to bed with the most shocking migraine and a strong tendency to bleed; one of that class, in other words, for whom cold, not the glowing fireplace, is the natural medium that offers protection from unremitting Evil, those who seem practically resurrected once terminal frost sets in and polar winds sweep round corners, for it is only winter that can clear their vision, cool their ungovernable passions and reorganize that mass of loose thought dissolved in summer sweats; and so it was along Baron Béla Wenckheim Avenue, leaning into the icy wind that frightens weaker ordinary people with its hard early frosts, that she felt cured and properly prepared to assess her new burden so that she could rise above Mrs Plauf’s hurtful attitude. Because there was much to rise above and aspire to and much to look at: so, while the cold penetrated and refreshed every atom of her body, she propelled the vast weight of her importance along the unremittingly straight pavement with ever greater abandon, as if she were as light as a sparrow, and decided to her satisfaction that the irreversible process of ruin, schism and disintegration would continue according to its own infrangible rules, and that, day by day, the range of ‘whatever things’ were still capable of functioning or showing vigour was growing narrower; the way she saw it the very houses were dying by imperceptible degrees of neglect, obedient to the fate that was certain to overtake them: the bond between lodger and lodging was broken; stucco was dropping in great chunks, rotten window-frames had separated from walls and, on either side of the street, roof after roof showed signs of sagging, as if deliberately to demonstrate that something in the constitution of beams and rafters—and not just beams and rafters but stones, bones and earth itself—was in the process of losing cohesion; along the pavements the rubbish that no one felt like collecting and no one did collect was spreading ever more luxuriantly across the whole town, and the cats that haunted loose mounds of it, cats whose numbers seemed to have increased at an impossible rate and who more or less took over the streets at night, had grown so confident that when Mrs Eszter wanted to cut through a thick forest of them they hardly deigned to move out of even her way, and when they did it was slowly, insolently, at the last possible moment. She saw all this as she saw the rusty shutters on shops not opened for weeks, the drooping arms of unlit ornamental lampposts, the cars and buses abandoned on the street for lack of fuel … and suddenly a delightful tickling sensation ran all down her spine because this slow decay had, for her, long ceased to signify some terminal disillusion but was instead a harbinger of what would soon replace a world as ripe for ruin as this; not an end then but a beginning, something that would be founded ‘not on sickly lies but on the harsh merciless truth’, something that would place supreme emphasis on ‘fitness of body and a powerful and beautiful desire for the intoxicating realm of action’. Mistress of the future, she already had courage enough to look the town full in the eye, perfectly convinced that she was standing on the threshold of ‘sweeping changes leading to something new, something of infinite promise’, and it wasn’t only the usual every-day signs of collapse that confirmed her view, but a good many ordinary yet strange and, in their own way, not altogether unwelcome occurrences which hastened to prove that the unavoidable resurrection, despite the lack of ‘normal human resolve to enter the fray’, had been ordained by the mysterious and overwhelming forces of heaven itself. The day before yesterday the enormous water-tower at the back of the Göndölcs Gardens had begun—and continued for some minutes—to sway dangerously above the tiny houses surrounding it, a phenomenon which, in the opinion of the physics and math master of the local grammar school, a trustworthy member of the astronomical observation group whose telescope was positioned on top of the tower and who had interrupted many hours of solitary chess to run down breathless with excitement to proclaim the news, was ‘quite inexplicable’. Yesterday, the clock of the Catholic church in the main square, immobile for decades, startled everyone by beginning to strike (a sound which shot like electricity through Mrs Eszter!), a fact all the more extraordinary when you considered that of the four rusted parts of the mechanism, three, from which even the hands had been removed, leapt into simultaneous action, and continued, with ever shorter intervals between their dull ticking, to beat out passing time. It was no wonder then that, having ever since nightfall expected to come upon some other ‘ominous sign’, she was not surprised at what she saw when, arriving by the Hotel Komló at the corner of Hétvezér Square, she glanced up at the gigantic poplar which used to stand there. This colossus, over sixty feet high, a constant reminder of the great floods of the nearby River Körös, a wonderful shelter for hordes of sparrows and a monument which for generations had been the marvel of the town, was lying, lifeless, against the hotel’s Hétvezér Square façade, straddled across the entire extent of the square, prevented from collapsing into the alley between only by thick branches entangled in the half-collapsed guttering; it wasn’t that the trunk h
ad been snapped in two by some violent gust, nor that it had been eaten away by worms and years of acid rain: the whole thing, roots and all, had split the hard concrete of the road. It was only to be expected that one day this ancient of days should eventually collapse, but that it should happen now, that the roots should release their hold at this precise moment, held a peculiar significance for Mrs Eszter. She stared at the ghastly apparition, at the tree lying diagonally across the dark square, then, with the knowing smile of one initiated into such things, remarked: ‘Of course. How could it be otherwise?’ and with this secret smile playing about her lips continued on her way in the secret knowledge that the sequence of ‘miracles’ and ‘omens’ was far from over. And she was not wrong. A mere few steps later, her eye, hungry now for more strange phenomena, lit on a small group of people silently loitering down Liget Street, whose presence here at this hour—for it was an act of courage to venture out of doors after dark in a town currently bereft of streetlighting—was wholly inexplicable. As to who they might be and what they wanted here at this time, she couldn’t begin to imagine, and truth to tell she wasn’t particularly bothered to try, for she immediately read this, along with the water-tower, the church clock and the state of the poplar tree, as simply another harbinger of the resurrection from ruins that was sure to follow; however, when, at the end of the boulevard, she entered the arena of Kossuth Square’s bare acacias and discovered group upon group of silently waiting people, a hot flush ran straight through her, since it suddenly occurred to her that it was not wholly impossible that after many long months (‘Years! Years! …’), after all her enduring and certain faith (‘Perhaps! …), the decisive moment when preparation would give way to action might actually have come and ‘the prophecy be fulfilled’. As far as she could see from this side of the square, roughly fifty to sixty men in twos or threes stood on the icy flat-trodden grass of the market-place: their feet shod in waterproof boots or heavy brogues, wearing caps with ear-flaps or greasy peasant hats on their heads and, here and there, hands clutching cigarettes that glowed into sudden life. Even under these conditions, in the darkness, it wasn’t hard to see that they were all outsiders, and the fact that fifty or sixty strangers should stand about in numbing cold at such a late hour of the evening was in itself more than surprising. Their dumb immobility seemed all the more peculiar and more spellbinding to Mrs Eszter, for it was like glimpsing the angels of the apocalypse in mufti at the end of the street. Though she should have crossed the square diagonally, cutting through by the most direct route to her flat in Honvéd Passage, just off the square, she felt a twinge—only a twinge, mind—of fear, and skirted their irregular ranks by pursuing an L shape round them, holding her breath and flitting like a shadow, till she reached the far side. Having arrived at the corner of Honvéd Passage and glancing back one last time, she was, if not exactly flabbergasted, certainly deeply disappointed to discover the enormous form of the circus vehicle, a circus whose arrival had been well advertised (though without a fixed date), for it was clear to her in a moment that the crowd behind her were not so much ‘the disguised heralds of the new age’ as, in all likelihood, ‘ragged ticket touts for the circus’, who, in their boundless avarice, were capable of suffering the whole night in the cold so that they could make a bit of money by buying up all the tickets in the morning once the booking office was open. Her disappointment was all the more bitter because, quite apart from the rude awakening it provided from her feverish reverie, it diminished the proud pleasure she had personally taken in the hiring and arrival of the by-now notorious company: the result of her first significant public victory a week ago when—with the decisive support of the police chief—she managed to crush the resistance of the more cowardly members of the town’s executive committee who, by referring to the fact that all reports from outlying villages and hamlets, not to mention unsubstantiated gossip, suggested that the weird troupe caused alarm and unrest wherever it appeared, and that, furthermore, there had been one or two ugly incidents, had wished to ban it altogether from the town’s precincts. Yes: it had been her first significant triumph (there were many who said that her speech about ‘the inalienable rights of common curiosity’ could easily have been printed in the papers), yet, despite this, she could not enjoy the fruits of victory, since it was precisely because of the circus that she discovered, too late, the laughably false nature of her misapprehension concerning the true identity of these loiterers about her. Since she felt the mordancy of ridicule more keenly than she did the attraction and mystery of the enormous wagon, she didn’t even bother to investigate it in order to satisfy her own ‘inalienable rights of common curiosity’ about a vehicle so exotic it fully lived up to its publicity, but with a withering glance of contempt turned her back on both ‘the stinking juggernaut and those impudent rogues’, and strode with clanging steps down the narrow pavement home. This fit of temper, needless to say—just like the one which followed her encounter with Mrs Plauf—consisted, as the idiom has it, more of smoke than of fire, and by the time she had reached the end of Honvéd Passage and slammed the frail gate of the garden behind her, she had succeeded in getting over her disappointment, for she had only to remind herself that by the end of the next day she would no longer be subject to her fate but the genuine master of it, and immediately she could breathe more easily and begin to feel the full import of her self once again, a self that chose decisively to dismiss any thought of premature daydreaming, since ‘it desired victory and was resolute in the pursuit of it’. The landlady, an old wine merchant, occupied the front block; she inhabited the rear building of the ramshackle peasant dwelling, and while the place could have done with some repair she was not dissatisfied with it; for though the low ceiling prevented her standing up as straight as she might have wished and undoubtedly made movement difficult, and while the tiny ill-fitting windows and the walls crumbling with damp left scope for improvement, Mrs Eszter was so far a disciple of the so-called simple life that she hardly noticed these insignificant details, since, according to her convictions, if there was a bed, a wardrobe, a lamp and a basin, and if the roof didn’t leak in ‘the living unit’, all possible human needs were satisfied. And so, apart from a vast sprung iron bedstead, a single wardrobe, a stool with basin and jug, and a crested chandelier (she tolerated neither carpet, nor mirror, nor curtains), there was only an unvarnished table and a chair that had lost its back to serve for meals, a fold-away music-stand for the increasing amounts of official paper-work she had to bring home, and a coat-stand for guests (should there be any) to hang their coats on. As concerned the latter of course, ever since she had met the chief of police, she received no one except him, and he came every evening, for, from the day when the leather belt and shoulder strap, the polished boots and the revolver hanging at his side had swept her off her feet, she regarded him not only as a close friend, a man fit to support a solitary woman, but as an intimate confederate to whom she could trust her deepest most dangerous secrets, and pour out her heart in moments of weakness. At the same time—apart from all the basic conditions—it was not a trouble-free relationship, for the police chief, who was in any case prone to morose silences punctuated by the odd sudden fit of temper, was preoccupied by his ‘tragic family circumstances’—a wife who died in the flower of her youth and two little boys left to cope without a mother’s affections—and was a slave to drink, and, on being repeatedly questioned about it, would often admit that the only true remedy for his bitterness lay in the feminine warmth exuded by Mrs Eszter, which, to this day, was a burden she could never escape from. To this very day indeed, for Mrs Eszter—who had expected him to have arrived well before her—feared that the chief was at this very moment sitting in one of those suburban bars in his customary state of tortured gloom, so when she heard footsteps outside she went straight to the kitchen table, immediately reaching for the vinegar and box of bicarbonate, knowing from previous experience that the only cure for his condition was that (unfortunately) highly popular local mixt
ure known as ‘goose-spritzer’, which, in the face of general opinion, she believed to be the only efficacious—if emetic—treatment, not only for indigestion the day after, but for drunkenness on the day. To her surprise the visitor turned out to be not the chief but Harrer, Valuska’s landlord, a stonemason who, probably because of his pockmarked face, was known to locals as ‘the vulture’; there he lay, flat out on the ground, because, as one could see at a glance, his legs, which were incapable of indefinitely supporting his constantly collapsing body, had given way just before his helplessly dangling hands could grasp the handle of the door. ‘What are you doing lying there?’ she barked at him, but Harrer didn’t move. He was a small, puny homunculus of a man; lying crumpled on the ground, his feeble legs folded under him, he would have fitted perfectly into one of those large dough-baskets stored out in the garden—furthermore he stank so intensely of cheap brandy that within a few minutes the fearful smell had filled the entire yard and penetrated every nook and cranny of the house, rousing even the old woman from her bed, who, as she drew the curtain of her courtyard window aside, could only wonder why ‘decent people can’t be content with drinking wine’. But by that time, Harrer, who seemed to have changed his mind, recovered consciousness and leapt from the doorway with such agility that Mrs Eszter almost thought the whole thing a joke. Nevertheless, it was immediately clear that it wasn’t, for waving his brandy bottle with one hand, the mason suddenly produced a tiny bouquet of flowers with the other, and, swaying in the most dangerous fashion, squinted at her in a manner so intensely beyond fooling, so utterly unreciprocated by Mrs Eszter—especially once she could make sense of his gulping and gasping to the effect that all he wanted was for Mrs Eszter to hug him as she once used to (for ‘you, your ladyship, and only you, can provide consolation for this poor sad heart of mine …!’)—that, grabbing him by the shoulder-pads of his coat, she raised him into the air and, sans quips or jokes, heaved him in the direction of the garden gate. The heavy coat landed like a half-empty sack some few yards off (for the sake of accuracy, right in front of the window of the old woman, who was still staring and wagging her head), and Harrer, while not quite certain whether this new fall was in any significant sense different from his earlier one, began to suspect he was not wanted and made to scamper away; leaving Mrs Eszter to return to her room, turn the key in the lock and try to put the affront out of her mind by switching on the pocket radio next to her bed. The pleasantly rousing tunes—‘jolly traditional airs’ as it happens—had, as always, a good effect on her, and little by little succeeded in calming her seething temper, which was just as well, for while she should have been used to such irruptions, it not having been the first time that feckless characters had disturbed her at night, she flew into a fury every time one of her old acquaintances, such as Harrer (to whom she had no real objection for she could happily while away the time with him—‘Now and then, of course, just now and then’), ‘showed a total disregard of her new social position’ in which she could no longer allow herself to relax, for whoever Mrs Eszter perceived as the enemy would be waiting ‘for precisely such an opportunity’. Yes, she needed her peace and quiet, for she knew that tomorrow the fate of an entire movement would be decided; rest was what she needed without a shadow of doubt; and that is why, on hearing the unmistakable sound of the police chief’s footsteps out in the yard, her first wish was that he would simply turn round with all his accoutrements of belt, strap, boots and gun and go home. But when she opened the door and saw the short and scrawny figure who hardly came up to her shoulders and was probably drunk again, a quite different desire suddenly took hold of her, for not only was he quite steady on his feet, he didn’t look as though he was about to start bawling at her either. He stood rather like ‘a panther about to spring’, with a pugnacious look which, she immediately understood, called less for bicarbonate of soda than abandoned passion; for her friend, companion and comrade—far surpassing her hopes of the evening—came to her as a hungry warrior, whom, she felt, it was impossible to resist. She couldn’t deny, for she never did lack masculine resolution, that ‘she was capable of properly appreciating the rubber-booted man who urged her on to rarely achieved heights of orgasm’, nor could she sneeze at the opportunity when someone of otherwise modest ability—like him—so clearly promised her personal advancement. So she said nothing, asked for no explanations, did not dismiss him, but, without any more ado, responded to his ever more passionate expression (which each second promised greater and greater delight), by languorously stepping out of her dress, dropping her underclothes in a heap on the floor, then slipping into the specially reserved flame-coloured baby-doll nightie he was so fond of and, as if obedient to command, arranging herself with a shy smile on all fours on the bed. By that time ‘her friend, companion and comrade’ had likewise divested himself of his gear, switched off the light and, wearing his heavy boots, with his customary shout of ‘To arms!’ threw himself on her. And Mrs Eszter was not disappointed: within a few minutes she had managed to rid the chief of all his troublesome memories of the evening, and after they had collapsed on the bed, breathless from their wild coupling, and he, gradually sobering, had received her acknowledgement of satisfaction delivered in an appropriately military manner, she rendered him a slightly edited version of her encounters with Mrs Plauf and the rabble in the market square, after which she felt so wonderfully confident and calm, her whole body suffused by such an extraordinarily sweet sense of peace, that she was certain that not only would the next day crown her with glory, but that there was no one who could possibly deprive her of the final fruits of victory. She wiped herself with a towel, had a glass of water, then lay back on the bed and only half-listened to the chief’s rambling account of his doings, because there was nothing more important now than this ‘confidence and calm’ and that ‘sweet sense of peace’, these messages of happiness that now rose from every nook and cranny of her body and rippled merrily through her. What did it matter that the ‘fat circus manager’ kept nagging him so long for ‘the customary local licence’, what did she care that the chief recognized ‘a gentleman from top to toe’ in the elegant though slightly fishy-smelling figure of the director of the world-famous company, and holding ‘an unopened bottle of Szeguin’ in his hand, extended his attention, as befitting a guardian of law and order, to suggest the assurance of some modest police presence (and that the request for such be tendered in writing) so that the three-day visiting performance be conducted without any let or hindrance, when she was just beginning truly to feel that everything was bound to lose significance once ‘the body began to speak’, and that there was nothing more delightful and elevating than the moment when thigh, tail, breast and groin desire nothing but to drift gently and smoothly into sleep? So satisfied did she feel that she confessed to him that she no longer needed him, and so, after he had several times ventured beyond the warmth of her eiderdown and shrank back in again, she sent the chief on his way with a few words of sound maternal advice regarding ‘the orphans’, watching him pass through the door into the freezing cold and thinking of him, if not precisely with love—for she had always dissociated herself from such romantic literary nonsense—then at least with a certain pride, then, having exchanged her seductive baby-doll for the warmer flannel nightgown, she slipped back into bed at last to enjoy ‘her well-earned sleep’. Using her elbow, she smoothed out the sheet where it had rucked up under her, dragged the eiderdown back over her with her feet, then, turning first on her left side then her right, found the most comfortable position to lie in, pressed her face into the soft warmth of her arm and closed her eyes. She was a sound sleeper, so after a few minutes she quietly nodded off, and the occasional jerking of her feet, the rolling of her eyeballs under their thin lids and the ever more regular rising and falling of the eiderdown were accurate indicators that she was no longer properly aware of the world about her, that she was drifting further and further from the present enjoyment of naked power which was rapidly diminishing but wo
uld be hers again tomorrow, and which in her hours of consciousness whispered that she was mistress of her poor cold possessions and that their fate depended on her. The washbasin no longer existed, neither did the untouched glass of bicarbonate; the wardrobe, the clothes-rack and the stained towel thrown into a corner, all disappeared; floor, walls and ceiling had no more meaning for her; she herself was nothing but an object among objects, one of millions of defenceless sleepers, a body, like others, returning each night to those melancholy gates of being which may be entered but once and then with no prospect of return. She scratched her neck—but she was no longer aware of doing so; for a moment her face contorted into a grimace—but it was no longer aimed at anyone in particular; like a child crying itself to sleep she gave a brief sob—but it no longer carried meaning because it was only her breath seeking a regular pattern; her muscles relaxed, and her jaws—like those of the dying—slowly fell open, and by the time the chief had negotiated the severe frost, got home and thrown himself fully clothed beside the sleeping forms of his two sons, she had already penetrated to the dense core of her dream … In the thick darkness of her room it seemed nothing stirred: the dirty water in the enamel basin was preternaturally still, on the three hooks of the clothes-rack, like great sides of beef above a butcher’s counter, hung her sweater, her raincoat and a substantial quilted jacket, the bunch of keys hanging from the lock had stopped swinging, having finally absorbed her earlier momentum. And, as if they had been waiting for just this moment, as if this utter immobility and complete calm had been some sort of signal, in the great silence (or perhaps out of it), three young rats ventured out from under Mrs Eszter’s bed. Carefully the first slithered past, shortly followed by the other two, their little heads raised and attent, ready to freeze before leaping; then, silently, still bound by their instinctive timidity, they proceeded, hesitating and freezing every few steps, to a tour of the room. Like intrepid scouts for an invading army apprising themselves of enemy positions before an onslaught, noting what lay where, what looked safe or dangerous, they examined the skirting boards, the crumbling nooks and corners and the wide cracks in the floorboards, as if mapping out the precise distances between the bolthole under the bed, the door, the table, the cupboard, the slightly teetering stool and the window-ledge—then, without touching anything, in the blinking of an eye, they shot off under the bed in the corner again, to the hole that led through the wall to freedom. It was no more than a minute before the cause of their unexpected retreat became apparent, for their intuition had warned them something was about to happen and this faultless, naked and instinctive fear of the unpredictable was enough to drive them to the option of immediate flight. By the time Mrs Eszter moved and disturbed the up-till-then-unbroken silence, the three rats were cowering in perfect safety at the foot of the outside wall at the back of the house; so she rose from the very ocean bed of sleep, drifting for a few minutes up into the shallows through which consciousness might faintly glimmer, and kicked off the eiderdown, stretching her limbs as if about to wake. There was of course no prospect of that yet and, after a few heavy sighs, she settled and began her descent into the depths from which she had only just risen. Her body—perhaps simply because it was no longer covered—seemed to grow even bigger than it already was, too big for the bed and indeed for the entire room: she was an enormous dinosaur in a tiny museum, so large no one knew how she had got there since both doors and windows were far too small to admit her. She lay on the bed, legs spread wide, and her round belly—very much an elderly man’s beer-gut—rose and fell like a sluggish pump; her nightgown gathered itself about her waist, and since it was no longer capable of keeping her warm, her thick thighs and stomach broke out in goosepimples. For now only the skin registered the change; the sleeper remained undisturbed, and since the noise had died away and there was nothing else to alarm them, the three rats once more ventured into the room, a little more at home this time but still maintaining utmost vigilance, prepared to flee at the slightest provocation, retracing their previous routes across the floor. They were so fast, so silent, their existence barely crossed the sensible threshold of reality; never once contradicting their blurry shadowy essence, they continually balanced the extent of their excursions against the peril of their sphere of activity, so that no one should discover them: those slightly darker patches in the darkness of the room were not hallucinations born of fatigue, not merely shadows cast by the immaterial birds of night, but three obsessively careful animals, tireless in their search for food. For that is why they had come as soon as the sleeper had fallen quiet, and why they returned, and if they hadn’t yet run up the table leg to pinch the heel of bread lying among the crumbs it was only because they had to be certain nothing unexpected would happen. They started with the crust, but little by little, and with ever greater abandon, they stuck their sharp little noses into the loaf itself and nibbled at it, though there was no sign of impatience in the rapid movement of their jaws, and the bread, tugged this way and that in three directions, was almost consumed by the time it rolled off the table and under the stool. Of course they froze when it hit the ground and once more stuck their snouts into the air, prepared to make a dash for it, but all was quiet on the Eszter front, there was nothing but slow even breathing, so, after a good minute of suspense, they quickly slipped to the floor and under the stool. And, as they were to find, it was in fact better for them here, for apart from the dense darkness providing greater protection, they could cut down the risks of exposure in retreating to the cover of the bed and thence to freedom when their extraordinary instinct finally told them to abandon the now barely recognizable piece of loaf. The night, in any case, was slowly coming to an end, a hoarse cockerel was furiously crowing, an equally angry dog had begun to bark and thousands and thousands of sleepers, Mrs Eszter among them, sensed the coming of dawn and entered the last dream. The three rats, together with their numerous confrères, were scuttling and squeaking in the neighbour’s tumbledown shed among frozen cobs of well-gnawed corn, when, like someone recoiling from a scene of horror, she gave a disconsolate snort, trembled, turned her head rapidly from left to right a few times, beating it on the pillow, then, staring-eyed, suddenly sat up in the bed. She struggled for breath and looked wildly this way and that in the still twilit room before she recognized where she was and understood that everything she had just abandoned had ceased to exist, then rubbed her burning eyes, massaged her goosepimpled limbs, drew the discarded covers over her and slid down again with a relieved sigh. But there was no question of going back to sleep because as soon as the awful nightmare vanished from her consciousness it was replaced by the awareness of the day ahead and what she was to accomplish, and such a thrill of pleasurable excitement ran through her she couldn’t drop off again. She felt refreshed and ready for action, and decided there and then to get up, for she was convinced that deed should immediately and without hesitation follow on design, so she threw off the eiderdown and stood a little uncertainly on the freezing floor, then donned her quilted jacket, grabbed the empty kettle and went out into the yard to bring in some water for washing. She took a deep lungful of chilling air, glanced at the dome of funereal cloud above her and asked herself if there could be anything more bracing than these merciless, masculine winter dawns, when cowards hide their heads and those ‘called to life venture bravely forth’. If there was anything she loved it was this, the earth clapped under ice, the razor-sharp air, and the unyielding solidarity of cloud which firmly repulsed the weak or dreamy gaze so the eye should not be confused by the potential ambiguities of the clear deep sky. She let the wind bite viciously into her flesh as the flaps of her jacket flew apart, and though the cold was practically burning her feet under the worn wooden soles of her slippers, it never entered her mind to hurry about her task. She was already thinking of the water that would wash away the remaining warmth of the bed, but she was to be disappointed in this, for though she was particularly looking forward to crowning the whole experience of dawn in this ma
nner, the pump wouldn’t work: the rags and newsprint they had tried to insulate it with had proved no defence against the withering cold, so she was forced to wipe away the scum on top of the water left in the basin from last night and, abandoning any idea of a thorough wash, to dab at her face and tiny breasts, and, likewise with her hairy lower torso, she had to be content with giving herself a military-style dry wipe, for ‘a person can’t be expected to squat over a basin as usual when the water’s so dirty’. Of course it upset her to have to forgo such arctic delights, but a little thing like this wouldn’t ruin her day (‘not this of all days …’), so once she’d finished wiping herself and imagined Eszter’s look of astonishment as, a few hours from now, he bent over the open suitcase, she dismissed the painful likelihood that she would ‘suffer from BO’ the rest of the day and busied herself mechanically fiddling with this and that. Her fingers fairly flew and by the time it was clear daylight she had not only dressed, swept up and made the bed but, having discovered the evidence of last night’s crimes (not that she minded them too much, for apart from having got accustomed to such things, she had developed something of an affection for these brave little revellers), she sprinkled the well-chewed remnant with a ‘trusty rat poison’, so ‘her sweet little bastards’ could feast themselves to kingdom come should they dare return to the room. And since there was nothing more to tidy, organize, pick up or adjust, with a superior smile on her lips she ceremoniously lifted the battered old suitcase off the top of the wardrobe, opened the lid, then knelt down beside it on the floor and ran her eyes over the blouses and towels, stockings and knickers stacked in orderly piles on the wardrobe shelves, and in a few minutes had transferred them all into the yawning depths of the suitcase. The clicking shut of the rusty locks, the pulling on of her coat and, after all the waiting, all the frustration, the setting out with only this lightest of burdens for company, of action in other words—this was precisely what she had longed for, the intoxicating fact of which went some way to explaining the degree to which she overestimated the significance and effect of her highly (perhaps too highly) planned coup. For it was undoubtedly the case—as she herself admitted later—that all this meticulous planning, fine calculation and boundless circumspection was quite unnecessary, for no more was required than that instead of the laundered knickers, socks, vests and shirts something entirely unexpected should be discovered there, in historical terms ‘the first and final notice of a victim in full realization of her rights’, and that if this day marked the beginning of something new it was simply a tactical switch from covert warfare—against Eszter and for ‘a better future’—to forthright attack. But here, proceeding along the narrow, icy pavements of Honvéd Passage, it seemed to her that if she were to step from the suffocating atmosphere of action-deferred into the dizzyingly fresh breeze of action-direct, it was impossible to be too circumspect, and so, while steaming full speed ahead towards the market square, she went over and over the minutiae of the words she might use, the words that would form the sentences which, once she located Valuska, would render him wholly impotent. She had no doubts, feared no unexpected turn of events, she was as certain in her own mind as anyone could be, yet every nerve and sinew in her body was concentrated on the impending encounter, to the extent that having reached Kossuth Square and glimpsed the group of ‘filthy touts’ who since the previous night had grown into a veritable mob, her reactions were less of shock than of angry frustration that she might not, she thought, get through to the other side without engaging in close hand-to-hand combat, though ‘any loss of time—in the present situation—was quite impermissible!’ However, since there was no alternative but to struggle through the multitude, for the immovable (and, because they held her up, in her eyes no longer supernatural) loiterers filled not only the square but the entrances of the neighbouring streets, she was forced to use the suitcase as an offensive weapon, while being careful occasionally to raise it above her head while weaving her way through to Híd Road and suffering the stares of slyly gleaming pairs of eyes and the fumblings now and then of impertinent hands. The great majority of those present were foreign, clearly peasants, attracted here, thought Mrs Eszter, by news of the whale, but there was an unsettling alien quality about the local faces too, faces she vaguely recognized as belonging to small farmers at the outskirts of town who brought their wares to the busy weekly market. As far as she could judge from the distance between them and from the thickness of the crowd, the circus management had not given very much indication that they would soon commence their undoubtedly unique performance, and having attributed the icy tension evident in eyes which caught hers to this, she no longer permitted that annoying impatience to preoccupy her, but on the contrary allowed herself, for one clear minute, since she had had no opportunity yesterday, to enjoy the proud self-satisfaction of the thought that this great mass of people were ignorant of the fact that everything, but everything, was only there thanks to her, for without her memorable intervention there would have been ‘no circus, no whale, no production of any kind’. Only for a minute, one brief minute, for once having left them behind and finally found her route past the older houses of Híd Road towards Count Vilmos Ápor Square, she had forcefully to remind herself that her concentration must be focused entirely elsewhere. She clutched the creaking handles of the suitcase with even greater fury, and slammed her heels down on the pavement with an even heavier military stride, and so soon managed to re-establish the train of thought which had been so annoyingly interrupted and lose herself in the labyrinth of words intended for Valuska’s ears, so much so that when she practically bumped into two policeman—probably on their way to the market—who greeted her with proper marks of respect, she quite neglected to return their salutations, and by the time she realized what had happened and waved after them in a somewhat preoccupied fashion they were already a long way down the road. By the time she reached the junction of Híd Road and ápor Square, however, there was no time left to contemplate anything, and in any case her train of thought had drawn up at the station; she felt that every word, every useful turn of phrase was now securely under her command, and, happen what may, nothing now could take her by surprise: dozens and dozens of times she had run the scene through in her imagination, how she would begin, what the other would say, and, since she knew the other as well as she did herself, she could add the finishing touches and stand before the breathtaking tower of her most effective sentences not only in the likelihood but in the certainty that forthcoming events would be resolved wholly to her advantage. It was enough to conjure up the pitiful figure, the sunken chest, the crooked back, the thin scrawny neck and those ‘warm liquid eyes’ overtopping all; it was sufficient to recall his eternal hobbling as he carried that enormous post-bag, lurched by the wall and stopped intermittently and hung his head; like someone who at every step stops to check that she actually sees what no one else sees, if only in order that she should have no further doubts about its existence, so she kept reminding herself that Valuska would do what was expected of him. ‘And if he shouldn’t,’ she smiled coldly, transferring the suitcase to the other hand, ‘I’ll give his stunted balls a little squeeze. The runt. The nobody. I eat his kind.’ She stood below the steeply pitched roof of Harrer’s house, took a quick look at the glass-topped wall before it and opened the gate in a manner sufficient to attract the immediate attention of the ‘eagle-eyed’ Harrer, who was in any case watching from one of the windows, so he should be in no doubt that this was no time for idle chatter, and that she would ‘simply and without warning step on any common or garden weed that got in her way’. And, as if to underline the point, she gave her suitcase a swing, though Harrer—labouring under the false impression that this gesture indicated she was on her way to meet him—was beyond being deterred by anything, and so it happened that when she was just about to turn right, bypassing the house, and make her way across the garden to the old kitchen-laundry which served as Valuska’s home, Harrer suddenly leapt out from behind the door,
threw himself in front of her and—silently, desperately—raised his haunted face to her with a look of entreaty. Mrs Eszter—seeing at once that her guest of last night, incapable of comprehension, was waiting for a forgiving word—showed no mercy; without so much as opening her mouth she sized him up in a glance and shoved him aside with her suitcase as lightly as she would some bent twig in her way, wholly ignoring his existence, as if all the guilt and shame—since Harrer now remembered last night all too well—which racked him counted for nothing. After all, no point in denying it, it genuinely did count for nothing, as did Mrs Plauf and the fallen poplar; nor did the circus, the crowd, not even the memories of times spent with the police chief, however sweet, mean anything now; so, when Harrer, with all the ingenuity of people hardened to bitter disappointment, and scarlet with ‘guilt and shame’, came full tilt round the other side of the house and stood silently before her, once more blocking the path to Valuska’s shack, she merely spat, ‘No forgiveness!’ at him and pushed on, for there were only two things that occupied her mind in its present state of fevered activity: the vision of Eszter leaning over the suitcase and understanding how truly trapped he was, and of Valuska, no doubt still lying fully clothed on his bed in that filthy hole of his, stinking of stale tobacco and staring with his brilliant eyes up at the ceiling without realizing that it wasn’t the twinkling night sky above him but a sheet of cracked and badly sagging plaster. And right enough, when after two sharp knocks she pushed the decrepit door open, she found precisely what she expected to find: under a ceiling of badly sagging plaster, in the stink of stale tobacco, the untidy bed; only those ‘brilliant eyes’ were nowhere to be seen … nor for that matter was the twinkling sky above.