The Melancholy of Resistance

by Krasznahorkai, László

  THE WERCKMEISTER

  HARMONIES

  Negotiations

  SINCE MR HAGELMAYER, THE PROPRIETOR OF Pfeffer and Co., Licensed Victuallers of Híd Road, or as it was more popularly known, the Peafeffer, was usually longing for bed by this time and had begun to consult his watch with an ever sterner look on his face (‘Eight o’clock, closing time, gentlemen!’), which meant that his rasping, already angry voice took on an even heavier emphasis and that he would shortly turn down the steadily purring oil-heater in the corner, switch off the light and, opening the door, usher his reluctant customers out into the unwelcoming icy wind beyond—it was no surprise to the happily grinning Valuska, squeezed in, as he was, among donkey jackets and quilted coats which had long been unbuttoned or thrown about the shoulders, to be called upon, indeed encouraged, to explain this business of ‘the erf and the mune’, for this is what they had asked for last night, the night before and goodness only knows how many nights before that, if only to distract the stubborn attention of the loud if sleepy landlord and allow for one last all-important spritzer. After such endless repetitions the explanation, which, as a piece of entertainment, had been polished as smooth as possible and simply served to occupy the time, had long ceased to be of interest to anyone. Certainly not to Hagelmayer, who valued the pleasures of sleep above all, and who, to keep things orderly, would call time half an hour early so that they should understand he was ‘not to be taken in by this worthless old trick’; not even to the indifferent gaggle of drivers, painters, bakers and warehousemen who patronized the place and had grown as familiar with the set speech as with the coarse taste of the penny riesling in their scratch-marked glasses and would not hesitate to stifle Valuska if, in his enthusiasm, he attempted to steer ‘his dear friends’ on to the subject of ‘the mind-bending vastness of the universe’, which meant digressing to the Milky Way, because they were as certain as could be that new wine, new glasses and new entertainments were all doomed to be ‘worse than the old’, and were not at all interested in any dubious innovation, the common, unspoken assumption based on years of experience being that any change or alteration, any adjustment of any kind—and this was generally agreed—spelled decay. And if events had taken one turn so far they were all the keener that that was the way they should continue, especially now when a great many more events, particularly the extraordinary cold—fifteen to twenty degrees below freezing since the beginning of December—went worryingly unexplained, and not a single snowflake in all that time but a frost which broke on them and had remained, nailed, as it were, quite unnaturally to the ground, contrary to normal expectations at the onset of a season, so much so that they were inclined to suspect that something (‘In the sky? On erf?’) had changed in the most radical fashion. For weeks now they had lived in a state between confusion and unease bordering on nervous melancholy, and having, furthermore, taken note of the posters that had appeared this very evening confirming rumours from nearby suburbs that the enormous, almost inevitably ill-omened whale was certain to arrive on the morrow (after all, ‘Who knows what this means? What it will lead to …?’), they were more than a little drunk by the time Valuska had arrived at this particular station of his rounds. As for him, though he too, of course, adopted a puzzled expression and shook his overburdened head whenever he was stopped and questioned on the subject (‘I don’t understand, János, I just don’t understand these days of judgement …’), and listened open-mouthed to everything that passed in the Peafeffer about the vague and, in some fashion, incomprehensibly mysterious air of danger surrounding the circus and its local prospects, he was unable to attribute any special significance to it all, and so, in the face of the general indifference, he, and only he, never got bored with it, nor ceased to enthuse about it; on the contrary, the very thought of sharing his thoughts with the others and so living through ‘this sacred turning point in nature’, filled him with a feverish excitement. What did he care now about the discomforts of the ice-bound city? Why should it interest him when people said, ‘I wonder when we’ll get some bloody snow at last’, provided that the feverish excitement, that passionate tense feeling deep inside him experienced in the few dramatic seconds of silence once his wholly unvaried performance was officially over, swept over him with its unsurpassable sweetness and purity—so much so that even the alien taste of his customary reward, a glass of wine watered down with soda, something that, along with cheap brandy and beer, he had never learned to like but couldn’t reject (for should he refuse this regular, and presumably presently forthcoming, token of his ‘dear friends’ affection, and betray his hatred of it by ordering some sweet liqueur, thereby finally confessing that he had always preferred sugary fizzy drinks, he knew that Mr Haglemayer would no longer tolerate his presence in the Peafeffer), seemed less unpleasant than usual. In any case there was no point in risking the less than complete confidence of both landlord and regular customers for the sake of such a trifle, especially seeing that by about six in the evening the business with his passionately admired and well-known patron was finished (as this warm and demonstrative friendship was something neither Valuska nor the local citizenry fully understood, he was all the more anxious to show his gratefulness), so after arranging all Mr Eszter’s affairs and having to leave him, he had, since time immemorial, made the inn behind the water-tower one of the chief havens on his eternal wanderings, the security and intimacy of its walls and the company of the ‘men of goodwill’ found therein holding peculiar attraction for someone of his stern integrity, and since—as he had often confessed to the stony-faced Mr Hagelmayer—he regarded the establishment as practically his second home, he was naturally unwilling to risk all this for the sake of the odd glass of liqueur, or indeed wine. And when he called for ‘another’, he might as well have been calling for the first, for it was precisely the immediacy and warmth of human company, that relaxed and liberating sense of well-being that he experienced on leaving the perpetual twilight of his very carefully tended elderly friend’s curtained room with its air of respectful embarrassment and timidity, which he most missed, isolated as he was in Harrer’s back garden in that one-time kitchen which now served as his room, which he found here and only here, in the Peafeffer, where, he felt, he was accepted, where he had only to repeat when requested his by now almost faultless performance of ‘an extraordinary moment in the regular movement of heavenly bodies’ to conform. In other words he had found acceptance and even if he had occasionally to produce an exceptionally passionate performance in order to convince his audience that their trust in him was well founded, it was undeniable that the crude banter directed exclusively at his innocent ever-willing self and his peculiar ‘mug’ did not preclude him feeling part of the undifferentiated mass of Hagelmayer regulars. Moreover, the continuing acceptance of his presence among them—and naturally enough he cultivated this, for alone and sober he would scarcely have been capable of sustaining the blazing fire of his stuttering rhetoric, having only the ‘theme’ itself to drive him on—among these drivers, warehousemen, painters and bakers, with what he perceived to be their comradely sense of solidarity, meant he could avail himself of the unceasing and regular opportunity of glancing into ‘the monumental simplicity of the cosmos’. Once given the word, the paraphernalia of the sensible universe—of which he had only a somewhat foggy perception in any case—immediately dropped away, he ceased to have any awareness of where he was or whom he was with, a single wave of the magician’s wand admitted him to the magical terrain; he lost sight of earthly things, whatever had weight, colour or shape simply dissolved in an all-pervasive lightness, it was as if the Peafeffer itself had gone up in a cloud of steam, and he was left alone with the brethren under God’s own sky, his gaze absorbed by ‘the marvels’ of which he spoke. Pointless to deny, of course, that there was absolutely no question of this last illusion coming true, since this peculiar gathering showed a certain obstinacy in dawdling within the four walls of the Peafeffer, the last thing on its mind being any kind of
venture into the great unknown, indeed it had given little sign of paying particular attention to the lone cry (‘Will you listen now! János is about to talk about them stars again!’) directing the audience to him. Some of them, those stuck in the corner nearest the fireplace, or under the coat-rack, or laid out across the bar, were suddenly smitten with the desire for a sleep so deep that not even a volley of cannon would have woken them, nor could he look for comprehension among those who, having lost the thread of conversation about the monster due to arrive on the morrow, remained standing but glassy-eyed, though, doubtless, having regard to the miserable innkeeper staring pointedly at his watch, both the horizontal and vertical among them would have agreed upon a common course of action, even if only one of their company, a purple-faced baker’s apprentice, was capable of giving it form by means of a sharp nod of the head. Naturally Valuska construed the onset of silence as an undoubted sign of the attention about to be concentrated on him, and, with the help of the house-painter who had invited his intervention in the first place—a fellow covered from head to foot in lime—employed what remained of his sense of direction to clear a space in the middle of the smoky bar: they pushed back the two chest-high drink stands that were anyhow in the way, and when the forceful if vain entreaties of his erstwhile assistant (‘G’won, squeeze up to th’wall a bit, willya!’) met the unsteady resistance of those clinging vaguely to their glasses and showing a few faint signs of life, they were constrained to employ the same methods on them so that after the minor kerfuffle caused by all that shuffling and involuntary backward-stepping, a space did in fact open, and Valuska, hungry by now for the limelight, stepped into it, and picked for his immediate audience those standing closest to him, who happened to be a lanky driver with a pronounced squint, and a great lump of a warehouseman, referred to for now simply as ‘Sergei’. There could be little doubt about the surprisingly alert house-painter—his willingness to help just now was evidence of that—but one couldn’t be quite so certain of the attention of the latter pair, since apart from the fact that they plainly had not the faintest clue what was going on or why they were being jostled this way and that, having been deprived of the physical support provided by the close mass of bodies, they stared blankly, in a vaguely dissatisfied manner, into the space before them, and instead of attending to Valuska’s usual introductory remarks and being affected by the strenuous rapture occasioned by his in any case incomprehensible words, they were busy struggling with tired eyelids that kept drooping, for the night that was closing in on them, in however momentary a fashion, carried the clear symptoms of a dizziness so acute that the spinning of the planets in their mad vortex acquired a somewhat inadequate but wholly personal dimension. But to Valuska, who was just concluding his gabbled prologue about ‘the lowly place of man in the great order of the universe’, and was about to take a significant step towards his swaying companions, this was of no particular account, since he himself could barely see the three of them; on the contrary, for unlike his ‘dear friends’ whose dormant imagination was scarcely to be awakened (if it could be woken at all) without the agency of their three selected representatives, he himself had practically no need of a launching pad in order to leap from this enervatingly dry and sparsely populated patch of earth into the ‘immeasurable ocean of the heavens’, since in the world of his reason and fancy, which was never in fact divided into two such distinct regions, he had spent over thirty-five years cleaving the silent spume of that starry firmament. He had no possessions to speak of—beyond his postman’s cloak and the leather-strapped bag, and cap and boots that went with it, he owned nothing—so it was natural for him to measure his lot by the dizzying distances of the infinite dome above him, and while that enormous, inexhaustible yet familiar playground allowed him complete freedom of movement, being a prisoner of that same freedom, he could find no place in the utterly different ‘enervating dryness’ below, and would often feast his eyes, as he did now, on what he considered to be the friendly, if sometimes dim and uncomprehending, faces opposite him, so that he could allot them their usual parts, beginning, in this case, with the gangling driver. ‘You are the Sun,’ he whispered in his ear, and it never occurred to him that this was not at all to the liking of the aforesaid, for it is annoying for a man to be mistaken for someone else, an insult in fact, especially when his eyelids insist on drooping and night creeps insiduously on so he is unable to raise even the mildest protest. ‘You are the Moon.’ ‘Valuska turned to the muscle-bound warehouseman, who shrugged his shoulder indifferently to indicate that it was ‘all the same to him’, and was immediately driven to the desperate expedient of waving his arms about in order to regain the balance lost through one careless movement. ‘An’ I’m the Erf, if I’m not mistook,’ nodded the house-painter in anticipation, and grabbing the wildly flailing Sergei, stood him at the centre of the circle, turning him to face the driver, who had grown morose from the continuous erosions of twilight, then, as befits one who knows his business, took an enthusiastic step behind them. And while Mr Hagelmayer, who had been fully eclipsed by this configuration of the four of them, yawned in protest, clattered the glasses and slammed lids to draw the attention of all those with their backs to him to the irredeemable passage of time, Valuska was promising to deliver an exposition so clear that everyone could understand it, that would provide, as he said, a chink through which ‘plain people such as we are might glimpse something of the nature of eternity’, the only assistance he required being that they should step with him into unbounded space where ‘the void which offered peace, permanence and freedom of movement was sole lord’ and imagine the impenetrable darkness which extended throughout that realm of incomprehensible, infinite, ringing silence. As far as the denizens of the Peafeffer were concerned, the ridiculously high-flown tenor of this well-known and by now tedious discourse, which would at least have sent them into a delirium of coarse laughter in the past, tended to leave them utterly cold; however, it took no great effort to play along with it, since complete and ‘impenetrable’ darkness was more or less precisely what they saw around them; and there was entertainment to be had, for despite their lamentable condition they couldn’t resist a throaty chuckle of delight when Valuska gave them to know that in this ‘infinite night’, the utterly paralytic squint-eyed driver ‘was the source of all warmth, in other words, life-giving light’. It is probably unnecessary to say that, compared to the inconceivable vastness of space, the room afforded by the inn was relatively small, so when it was time to set the planets in motion Valuska was resigned to an imperfect representation of the scale involved and did not even attempt to set the helpless and despondent driver, who stood in the centre with his head sunk on his chest, spinning about his axis but, in his customary fashion, addressed his instructions only to Sergei and the increasingly enthusiastic house-painter. Though even this did not go without the odd hiccup, for while the roguishly grinning figure of Earth confronted his slowly sobering audience and completed the complex manoeuvre of two orbits round the lanky Sun with embarrassing and acrobatic ease, the Moon keeled over as if poleaxed by news of some terrible misfortune as soon as Valuska touched him, and despite every well-intentioned precaution all attempts to set him on his feet again proved sad failures, so that even he, in the midst of his enthusiastic running about and inspired if constantly stuttering monologue, had to admit it might be better to replace the heavily indisposed warehouseman with some more useful assistant. At this moment, however, just when the delight of the audience was reaching its peak, the Moon pulled himself together and, as if he had discovered a potent remedy for his acute dizziness, altered the disposition of his squat legs and, turning at an acute angle, launched himself—albeit in the wrong direction—into orbit and, beginning to spin, got so carried away with the process that his movements—which resembled nothing so much as the steps of the familiar csárdás—suggested he was capable of carrying on for some time in this manner, and, what was more, he had even recovered (‘… thereyougo … ooplah
… sodit … whoopsa …’) his powers of speech to some degree. Eventually everything was ready, and Valuska, having stood aside for half a minute or so to wipe his sweating brow—for he didn’t want to run the risk of even momentarily preventing anyone enjoying the glorious spectacle of the heavenly harmony of Earth, Moon and Sun in such carefully planned conjunction—got down to the business in hand; briefly raising his cap, he smoothed his hair back out of his eyes, swept his arms dramatically before him to recall, what he sincerely felt to be, everyone’s rapt attention and, animated by the intense flame within him, lifted his flushed face heavenward. ‘At first, so to speak … we hardly realize the extraordinary events to which we are witness …’ he began, rather quietly, and hearing his whisper, everyone immediately stopped speaking, in anticipation of the storms of laughter to come. ‘The brilliant light of the Sun,’ his broad gesture took in the driver, who ground his teeth, struggling against the sea of troubles besetting him, and extended to the hypnotically circling figure of the house-painter, ‘floods Earth with warmth … and light … the side of Earth facing it, that is.’ He gently steadied the lewdly grinning representation of Earth and turned him to face the Sun, then stepped behind him, leaning on him, almost embracing him, craning over his shoulder, the intense look on his face suggesting he was merely the medium for the others, and blinked at what he termed the ‘blinding radiance’ of the unsteady driver. ‘We are standing in this … resplendence. Then, suddenly, we see only that the round disc of the Moon …’ here he grabbed Sergei and propelled him from his orbit round the house-painter to an intermediary position between the Sun and the Earth, ‘that the round disc of the Moon … creates an indentation … a dark indentation on the flaming body of the Sun … and this indentation keeps growing … You see? …’ Again, he emerged from behind the house-painter, and gave a gentle shove to the almost terminally furious but helpless warehouseman. ‘You see … and soon enough, as the Moon’s cover extends … we see nothing but this brilliant sickle of sunlight in the sky. And the next moment,’ whispered Valuska in a voice choking with excitement, running his eyes to and fro in a straight line between driver, warehouseman and house painter, ‘let us say it’s one p.m… . we shall witness a most dramatic turn of events … Because … unexpectedly … within a few minutes … the air about us cools … Can you feel it? … The sky darkens … and then … grows perfectly black! Guard dogs howl! The frightened rabbit flattens itself against the grass! Herds of deer are startled into a mad stampede! And in this terrible and incomprehensible twilight … even the birds (‘The birds!’ cried Valuska, in rapture, throwing his arms up to the sky, his ample postman’s cloak flapping open like bat’s wings) … ‘the very birds are confused and settle on their nests! And then … silence … And every living thing is still … and we too, for whole minutes, are incapable of speech … Are the hills on the march? Will heaven fall in on us? Will earth open under our feet and swallow us? We cannot tell. It is a total eclipse of the sun.’ He spoke these last sentences, as he had the first, in the same prophetic trance and in the same order as he had done for years, with not the minutest variation in his delivery (consequently there was nothing surprising in his speech), so these peculiarly powerful words, and the way they drained him, leaving him exhausted, adjusting the strap of his postman’s bag which kept sliding off his shoulder while he smiled delightedly at his audience, did nevertheless have the residual effect of unsettling them and for a full half-minute there was not a sound to be heard in the crowded pub, and the customers gathered there, despite having recovered once, now experienced a new wave of confusion and stared blankly at Valuska and could do nothing to satisfy their inclination to throw some cheery remarks his way, as if there were something disturbing about the knowledge that the reason old ‘Half-wit János’ found it hard to return to the unbearable ‘enervating dryness’ was that he never actually left ‘the great ocean of the stars’, while they, like so many fish out of water speckled by light refracted through the dimples in their glasses, had never actually moved out of the desert.