Had the inn shrunk for a moment?
Or was the world too vast?
Had they heard these words so many times
in vain,
‘the darkening sky’
and ‘the earth opening underfoot’
and ‘birds settling on their nests’,
their wild clangour
alleviating something in them once more,
but only once,
some burning itch
of which, as yet, they had no knowledge?
Hardly: they had simply, as they say, ‘left the door open’ a fraction of a second, or merely—having waited specifically for this—succeeded somehow in forgetting the ending; in any case, once the silence in the Peafeffer had stretched as far as it would go, they quickly found their tongues and, like someone who has become so absorbed in observing the lazy arc of a bird in flight that he is forced to wake suddenly from some dream of flying and sharply re-establish contact with terra firma, they found that indecisive, hazy, formless and ephemeral feeling being swept away by the startling consciousness of drifting cigarette smoke, the tin chandelier hanging above them, the empty glasses gripped tightly in their hands and the figure of Hagelmayer behind the bar, swiftly and remorselessly buttoning his overcoat. In the ensuing storm of ironic applause, they pressed flesh and administered numerous slaps on the back, congratulating the radiantly proud house-painter and the two other, by now wholly insensate, heavenly bodies and within a few seconds, Valuska, having received his glass of wine, found himself alone. Awkwardly, he withdrew from the forest of donkey jackets and quilted coats into a corner of the bar offering more air, and since he could no longer count on the others’ attention, he being once more the loner, the one truly inspired and faithful witness of the confluence of the three planets and their subsequent history, still dizzy after the presentation of the spectacle and the joy of the hubbub he assumed to be cheering he followed in splendid isolation the progress of the Moon as it swam beyond the glowing further surface of the Sun … Why? Because he wanted to see, and did in fact see, the light returning to the Earth; he wanted to feel, and did in reality feel, the fresh flood of warmth; he wanted to experience, and genuinely did experience, the deeply stirring sense of freedom that understanding brings to a man who has laboured in the terrifying, icy, judgemental shadow of fear. But there was no one to whom he could explain this or even speak about it, for the general public, as was its wont, tended not to listen to what it considered to be ‘idle chatter’, and now, with the passing of the ghostly eclipse, it regarded the performance as finished and stormed the bar in hope of a last spritzer. The return of light? The gentle flood of warmth? Profundity and liberation? At this point, Hagelmayer, who seemed to have followed Valuska’s line of thought to a T, couldn’t help but intervene: half-asleep by now, not having felt any great depth of emotion himself, he doled out the ‘last orders’, switched off the light, opened the door and sent them on their way, bellowing, ‘Out of here, you great vats of booze, out with you!’ There was nothing to be done about it, they had to resign themselves to the fact that the evening was truly over: they’d been kicked out and were forced to go their several ways. So they filed out in silence, and while the majority showed no particular desire for further entertainment, there was a couple here and there who, when Valuska bade them a warm good night at the door (it wasn’t possible to bid farewell to everyone, for some, particularly those who had been woken too suddenly and shoved out into the icy cold, were too busy throwing up against the outside wall), gazed after him as they had done the previous night and who knows how many nights before, watching as he, still under the spell of his vision, proceeded on his way with that characteristically cramped gait of his, leaning forward, head bowed, pattering on tiny feet, almost breaking into a run (‘as if he had something important to do’) down the deserted street, and they sniggered behind their hands, and then, as he turned off by the water-tower, burst into loud and healthy laughter, for there wasn’t much else to laugh about—particularly these days, when driver, warehouseman, house-painter and baker all felt as if ‘time had somehow stopped’—except Valuska, who, as they used to say, provided ‘free ‘ntertainment’, not only with his act, but with his whole appearance, with those mild fawnlike eyes ever shining, that nose, so like a carrot in both colour and length, that postbag which never left his side, and that impossibly baggy coat thrown over that skinny body of his—all this was, in some strange fashion, invariably amusing and proved an eternal fount of rare good spirits. Nor was the crowd gathered before the Peafeffer entirely wrong in its surmise, for Valuska really had ‘something important to do’. As he attempted rather shyly to explain when they shouted after him and teased him about it, he had ‘to run the full distance before bedtime’, which was to say he had to run the gamut of darkened lampposts, which, since they no longer served any useful purpose, had for the last few days been turned off at eight o’clock, so he could inspect the silent, frozen city from St Joseph’s Cemetery to Holy Trinity Cemetery, from Bárdos Ditch, across the empty squares, to the railway station, accomplishing, along the way, a complete tour of the general hospital, the law courts (incorporating the prison), and, of course, the castle and Almássy Palace (unrestorable, therefore restuccoed once every ten years). What all this was in aid of, what the point of it was, no one knew for certain, and the mystery grew no clearer when, in reply to the insistent questioning of one or other local, he suddenly reddened and proclaimed that he was ‘driven, alas, by a constant inner compulsion’; though this meant nothing more than that he was neither capable of distinguishing nor willing to distinguish between his home in what used to be the kitchen in Harrer’s backyard and the homes of everyone else, between the press office and the Peafeffer or between the railway points and the streets and tiny parks, that he couldn’t, in other words, discern any vital organic difference between his life and the lives of others, considering literally the whole town from Nagyvárad Avenue to the powdered-milk factory as his abode, and, since a landlord was bound to make his rounds on a regular, daily basis, he—trusting everyone, protected by his half-wit reputation and accustomed through the excesses of his imagination to ‘the free highways of the universe,’ in comparison with which the town appeared no more than a tiny rumpled nest—would roam the streets as blindly, as blindly and tirelessly, as he had done for the past thirty-five years. And, since his whole life was an endless tour of the inner landscape of his nights and days, his claim that he ‘had to run the full distance before bedtime’ was something of a simplification, firstly because he slept only a couple of hours before dawn (and even then fully clothed and practically awake, so it was hard to regard this as ‘bedtime’ in any conventional sense) and secondly because, as concerns this peculiar ‘run’ of his, for the last twenty years he had simply dashed about town in a harum-scarum fashion so neither Mr Eszter’s curtained room, nor the bureau, the junction, the hop, not even the pub behind the water-tower, could be properly considered stations on his eternal flight. At the same time, this ceaseless pounding of his, which by its very nature was enough to cause others to regard him less as one of their own and more as a bit of local colour to put it mildly, did not add up to some permanent, close or jealous keeping of the watch, still less as a crazy kind of alertness, though for the sake of simplicity, or by reason of a deeply implanted instinctive reaction, certain people, when invited to express their opinion, chose to regard it as such. For Valuska, disappointed in his desire to have the dizzying vaults of heaven constantly in view, had got used to staring at nothing but the ground beneath him, and consequently didn’t actually ‘see’ the town at all. In his worn-down boots, his heavy service coat, his official cap with its insignia and the strapped bag like an organic growth on his side, he made his infinite, characteristically waddling, crook-backed rounds past the decaying buildings of his birthplace, but as to seeing—he saw only the ground, the pavements, the asphalt, the cobbles and the straggling weeds that sprouted between them on roads the
frozen rubbish made almost impassable, straight roads, curved roads, gradients rising or falling away, no one knew the cracks and missing paving stones better than he (he could tell precisely where he was with his eyes closed by feeling the surface through his soles), but as for the walls that aged along with him, the fences, the gates and the minute details of eaves, he remained oblivious to these for the simple reason that he could not have borne the slightest contrast between their present appearance and the picture his imagination retained of them, and so, in effect, he acknowledged only their essential reality (that they were there in other words), in much the same way as he did the country, the decades that seemed to melt into each other as they passed, and people generally. Even in his earliest memories—dating roughly from the time his father was buried—he seemed to be walking these same streets (only in essence once again, for all he really knew was the small area round Maróthy Square which, as a six-year-old child, he ventured to explore), and, truth to tell, there was hardly a chasm, nay, not even any perceptible demarcation line, between the person he had then been and the person he now was, since, even in that dim past (perhaps dating from the walk home from the cemetery?) when he was first capable of observing and comprehending, it was the same starry sky with its tiny flickering lights in the extraordinary vastnesses of space that held him captive. He gained height, grew thin, the hair on his temples had begun to grey, but, now as then, he had none of that useful sense of proportion, nor could he ever develop anything of the sort, which might have helped him distinguish between the continuous flux of the universe of which he constituted a part (though a necessarily fleeting part) and the passage of time, the perception of which might have led to an intuitive and wise acceptance of fate. Despite vain efforts to understand and experience what precisely his ‘dear friends’ wanted from each other, he confronted the slow tide of human affairs with a sad incomprehension, dispassionately and without any sense of personal involvement, for the greater part of his consciousness, the part entirely given over to wonder, had left no room for more mundane matters, and (to his mother’s inordinate shame and the extreme amusement of the locals) had ever since then trapped him in a bubble of time, in one eternal, impenetrable and transparent moment. He walked, he trudged, he flitted—as his great friend once said, not entirely without point—‘blindly and tirelessly … with the incurable beauty of his personal cosmos’ in his soul (for decades now he had gazed at the same sky above him, and trod much the same route of concrete and weeds beneath), and if his life had anything that might be called a history at all, it consisted of those thirty-five years of ever deepening orbits from the time he left the immediate precincts of Maróthy Square to when his tours encompassed the whole town, for the startling truth was that in every other respect he remained exactly what he had been in childhood and whatever has been said about his destiny the same, with equal justice, might be said about his mind, which underwent no significant change, for the sense of awe—even over twice thirty-five years—is ahistorical. It would, however, be a mistake to believe (as did, for example, the denizens of Peafeffer, albeit behind his back) that he took no notice of anything around him, that he had no idea that people regarded him as a halfwit, and, above all, that he was unaware of the malicious nudges and winks he attracted, which he accepted as his lot. He recognized these things perfectly clearly, and whenever a voice, in the inn or on the streets, in the Komló or up the junction, broke in on his ethereal circuit with a loutish cry of, “Ere János, how’s things in the cosmos?’ he detected the simple goodwill beneath the mocking tones, and guiltily, like anyone caught with ‘his head in the clouds’, he blushed, averted his eyes and, in a faint falsetto voice, mumbled something by way of answer. For he himself acknowledged that, possessed as he was by a vision of which ‘the regal calm of the universe’ would be an inadequate description, the mere glimpse of which he barely deserved and on explanations of which he was constantly willing to launch forth in an attempt to share his slender knowledge (as he tried to share whatever he had) with the limited audience of the frequently depressive Mr Eszter and his cronies in the Peafeffer, he was occasionally quite properly reminded that he should attend as much to his sorry state and lamentable uselessness as to the hidden delights of the universe. Not only did he understand the irreversible verdict of the public, but—and this was no secret—he largely agreed with it, often proclaiming himself to be ‘a real fool’ who would not quarrel with the obvious and knew what enormous debt of gratitude he owed to the town who did not ‘lock him up where he belonged’, but tolerated the fact that despite all his expressions of regret he was incapable of withdrawing his eyes from that which ‘God had created for all eternity’. How contrite he actually felt, Valuska never said, but in any case he was genuinely incapable of directing the gaze of those much mocked ‘brilliant eyes’ anywhere but the sky: though one did not have to, nor could one, believe this in the literal sense, if for no other reason than that the immaculate work, ‘God’s eternal creation’, at least here in the sheltered valley of the Carpathian mountains, was shrouded in almost permanently thick mist, comprised now of damp fog, now of impenetrable cloud, so Valuska was compelled to rely on his memory of ever shorter summers, summers that year by year imperceptibly had become still more fleeting, and was, therefore, almost from the very beginning, forced, however cheerfully, to relive—in Mr Eszter’s characteristically adroit phrase—‘his brief glimpse of ever clarifying totality’ while studying the thick relief map of rubbish on uneven pavements in the annually gathering gloom. The sheer brilliance of his vision could crush him one moment and resurrect him the next, and although he could talk of nothing else (believing as he did that ‘the matter was in everyone’s interest’), his command of language was such that he could never begin, even vaguely, to explain what it was that he did see. When he declared that he knew nothing of the universe, they neither believed nor understood him, but it was quite true: Valuska really did know nothing about the universe, for what he knew was not exactly knowledge. He had no sense of proportion and was entirely lacking the compulsive drive to reason; he was not hungry to measure himself, time and time again, against the pure and wonderful mechanism of ‘that silent heavenly clockwork’ for he took it for granted that his great concern for the universe was unlikely to be reciprocated by the universe for him. And, since this understanding of his extended to life on earth generally and the town in which he lived particularly—for it was his experience that each history, each incident, each movement and each act of the will was part of an endless repetitive cycle—his relationship to his fellow human beings was governed by the same unconscious assumption; being unable to detect mutability where there plainly wasn’t any, he made like the raindrop relinquishing hold of the cloud which contained it, and simply surrendered to the ceaseless execution of his preappointed task. He passed beneath the water-tower and circumnavigated the enormous concrete ring lined by the sleepy oaks of the Göndölcs Gardens, but because he had done this in the afternoon, in the morning, yesterday and the day before, in fact on countless mornings, noons, afternoons and evenings before, now, when he turned back and started down Híd Road, the street parallel with the main trunk road, it made no sense for him to draw any distinction between this experience and any other, so he drew none. He cut across the junction with Erdélyi Sándor Road, waving in an amiable manner to a solemn and immobile group of people gathered round the artesian well (though they were mere blots and shadows to him), made his familiarly waddling way to the bottom of Híd Road and, skirting the station, dropped into the news-stall and drank a scalding cup of tea with the railwayman who, having being frightened by ‘some enormous vehicle’, complained about the ‘awful weather’ and the chaotic timetable—and this was more, we should say, than a formal repetition of what had happened the previous day or the day before that, it was identical, precisely the same steps proceeding in precisely the same direction, as if it possessed that complete and indivisible unity underlying all appearance of movement and direct
ion, a unity which can concentrate any human event into one infinite moment … He heard the warning whistle of the sleeper from Vésztö (a chance arrival, off timetable, as usual), and when the rusty engine ground to a halt before the perplexed but saluting stationmaster, he took a quick look through the news-stall’s window at the unexpected apparition and the suddenly crowded platform, thanked the railwayman for the tea and, taking his leave of him, made his way through the huddled masses looking lost beside the heavily puffing engine, and crossed the station forecourt so as to continue past the stray cats of Béla Werckheim Avenue—not following just any old route down it but placing his feet in his own bootprints along the frosted and sparkling pavement. Adjusting the strap of his bag, which kept slipping off his shoulder, he twice circumnavigated the law courts and the attached prison, made a few tours of the castle and the Almássy Palace, ran along the banks of the Körös Canal under bare weeping willows, down to the bridge of the German Quarter, where he turned off towards the Wallachian cemetery—wholly ignoring the silent and immobile crowds who seemed to have taken possession of the whole town, crowds comprising precisely those people to whom—but he had no way of guessing this—his fate would be inextricably linked for the foreseeable future. He moved untroubled through that desolate landscape, among the crowds, among abandoned buses and cars, moving as he did through his own life, like a tiny planet unwilling to enquire what gravitational field he moves in, entirely consumed by the joyful knowledge that he may play his part, however humble, in a scheme of such monumental calm and precision. In Hétvezér Passage he ran into a fallen poplar, but his interest was roused not by the tree’s bare crown lying in the gutter but by the slowly dawning sky above it, and it was the same later in the Komló Hotel, where he called in to warm himself up in the night porter’s stuffy glass compartment, when the porter, still red after his exertions earlier in the evening, told him about the enormous circus truck he had seen (‘… Yesterday, it must have been, about eight or nine o’clock …’) rolling through the street (‘You’ve never seen the like of it, János! It knocks your vast cosmos into a cocked hat, mate …!’), for it was the approaching dawn that held him in its spell, that ‘promise kept each morning’ that the earth, along with the town and his own person, would emerge from beneath the shadow of night, and that the delicate glimmer of dawn would yield to the bright light of day … The porter might have said anything at all, might have described the crowds apparently hypnotized by ‘what everyone says is its uncanny attraction’, might have suggested to him later, as they were standing before the hotel entrance, that they should set out there and then to see it for themselves (‘This you just have to see, old chum’), but Valuska—pleading that he had to visit the depot first and pick up the papers—would have taken no notice of him, for though he too, in his own fashion, was curious about the whale, he wanted to remain alone under the brightening sky and stare—as far as he could, for thick impenetrable clouds covered the sky—into ‘the well of heaven, whence proceeds that inexhaustible light until the advent of night’. The way was rather a struggle, for between the railway points and the station dense waves of people were pressing forward, and being used to scuttling along rather fast he found himself constantly having to apply the brakes if he wished to avoid collisions on the narrow pavement, though he was barely aware of struggling for there was something about drifting in this solemn flood of humanity in a state of cosmic awareness that made it seem the most natural of activities, and, hardly noticing the surprising multitude, he absorbed himself ever more deeply in what, for him, were moments of exaltation as an insignificant inhabitant of the planet earth which was even now turning its face towards the sun, an exaltation so intense that by the time he finally reached the market end of the boulevard again (his bag filled with some fifty copies of an old newspaper since, as he discovered at the depot, copies of the new ones had once again gone astray), he wanted to cry aloud that people should forget about the whale and gaze, each and every one of them, at the sky … Unfortunately the frozen and impatient crowd, which by now occupied almost the whole of Kossuth Square, instead of the sparkling expanse of heaven above saw only an inconsolably bleak, tin-coloured mass before them, and, judging by the tension—rather unusual, one would have said, for the appearance of a circus act, an almost ‘tangible’ tension—of the wait, it was obvious that nothing would have dragged their attention away from the purpose of their pilgrimage. What was hardest of all to understand was what they wanted here, what drew them so remorselessly on to what after all was only a circus bill, since the question of how they could tell how much of the doomy prognostications of ‘the fifty-metre truck-load’ was true or whether there was any basis at all to the absurd gossip regarding the ‘spellbound mob’ that was supposed to have grown by now into a kind of army that followed the whale from village to village and town to town was something that the individual locals who had ventured into Kossuth Square (the night porter being counted among such brave spirits) could easily answer, for the exhausted and impoverished-looking mass and the terrifying blue-painted tin colossus spoke eloquently for themselves. They spoke for themselves without betraying anything of importance, for while the sheer phenomenon was enough to prove that those ‘sober-minded, common-sense people’ who only yesterday were declaring ‘the whole thing’ to be no mystery, simply the usual clever trick employed by travelling circuses to create interest, were wrong, and the apparently baseless gossip regarding it was true, the few local citizens who had wandered into the square were, understandably enough, still at a loss to explain either the constant flow of new arrivals or the spell of the advertised gigantic whale. According to townspeople this shadowy army was drawn from the surrounding district, and while the local origin of the by now at least three hundred people was not to be questioned (for where else could they have come from but nearby villages and hamlets, those bleak outer suburbs of Vésztö, Sarkad, Szentbenedek and Kötegyán), no one could really believe that thiry years after the Flowering of the Nation, with its high-sounding plans, there should still remain so large a rabble of frightening, villainous-looking, good-for-nothing, possibly threatening characters thirsting after the crudest and most vulgar of miracles. Putting aside the twenty or thirty figures who, for some reason or other, did not seem to fit (and these later turned out to be the most determined among them), the close on three hundred remaining were notably of a kind, and the very appearance of three hundred fur jackets, quilted waistcoats, coarse woollen overcoats and greasy peasant hats, to say nothing of three hundred pairs of iron-heeled boots, all of which suggested a deep affinity, was quite enough to transform an active curiosity, such as that felt by the night porter, who watched the mob from a respectful distance, into fraught concern. But there was something else: the silence, that stifled, unbroken, ill-omened silence in which not a single voice rang out, and hundreds of people waited, growing impatient, yet obstinately stoical and utterly silent, ready to stir once the acute suspense associated with such events gave way to the ecstatic roar of the ‘performance’, each individual isolated as if he had nothing to do with anyone else, as though it was of no concern to anyone why everyone else happened to be there, or, conversely, as if they were all part of an enormous chain-gang in which the ties that bound them negated all possibility of escape thereby rendering pointless any communication or conversation between them. The nightmarish silence was, however, only one reason for this state of ‘terminal anxiety’; the other undoubtedly lay hidden in that monstrous truck besieged by the multitude, as the porter and other similarly curious observers might immediately surmise, for there was neither handle nor grip nor any kind of chink in that riveted tin box, nothing at all that might suggest a door, and therefore it seemed (however impossible it might be to apprehend) that here, before the eyes of several hundred spectators, stood a contraption without any opening whatsoever at front, rear or side, and that the throng confronting it was in effect attempting to pry it open through sheer dumb obstinacy. And the fact that this tensi
on and anxiety in the lingering crowd was not to be relaxed by any means owed not a little to the common feeling that the relationship between whale and audience was, probably, entirely one way. In the circumstances it was apparent that what had brought them here was not so much the keen anticipation of attending an unusual spectacle, but, much more likely, a sense that they were witnesses to some curiously motivated, long-standing and, for all practical purposes, already decided contest, the most fearsome element of which, they had heard, was the superior contempt with which the two-man company—the owner being an apparently sickly and overweight figure calling himself ‘The Director’, the other, according to stray rumours, an enormous behemoth of a man who was once a boxer but had degenerated since into a general circus helper—treated their audiences, audiences who by any stretch of the imagination could not be accused of being fickle or indifferent. Despite what had obviously been hours of waiting there was nothing actually happening in the square, and since there was no sign that the performance would ever commence, numerous locals, including the porter, were beginning to suspect that there could be only one reason for this deliberate delay: the base pleasure taken by the whale’s attendants in knowing they could command the patience of a crowd practically frozen in the dry cold while they themselves were having a gay old time somewhere else. And, having been obliged to follow this train of thought in order to find a rational explanation, it wasn’t hard to continue along the same path and convince oneself that the ramshackle truck belonging to ‘this bunch of con-men’ contained either nothing at all, or, if anything, then a stinking corpse whose plain lack of interest they disguised by a factitious, if effective, piece of market publicity about some so-called ‘secret’ … In this and other similar sundry fashions they continued their lucubrations in the more sheltered and inconspicuous nooks of the square, while Valuska, taking absolutely no notice of the anxiety around him and still dreamy-eyed from watching the sunrise, quickly wormed his way to the front of the crowd and up to the wagon, cheerfully apologizing as he went. Nothing worried him, and he had not the slightest notion of anything out of place; indeed, having arrived at the front and taken cognizance of the enormous conveyance resting on its eight double wheels, he stared at it as if it were something out of a fairy tale, something whose very size banished the thought of disappointment. Round-eyed, he scanned the nearside of the vehicle from front to rear, shaking his head in wonder and, like a child confronted with a gift wrapped in shiny paper or done up in a beribboned box, he pondered what he might find once the package was undone. It was the curious writing on the side of the van that chiefly fascinated him; he had never seen letters or signs like it, and, having attempted to read it from both bottom to top and from right to left and failed to make any sense of it, he lightly tapped the shoulder of the person nearest to him and asked, ‘Excuse me—you wouldn’t happen to know what it says there?’ But the individual thus addressed failed to respond and having tried a second time, a little louder, and been rebuffed with a deep slow growl advising him, in effect, to shut his face, Valuska thought he too had better stand perfectly still, rooted to the spot like the others. But he couldn’t keep it up for long. He blinked twice, adjusted the strap of his bag, cleared his throat and turned to the grim figure beside him, remarking in a friendly way that he had never seen anything like it in his life, that while the occasional travelling circus might come round from time to time, it was nothing like this, not half as riveting, though he had just arrived, of course, and he simply couldn’t imagine what such an enormous creature might be stuffed with, though it was likely to be wood-shavings, and did he happen to know what the entrance fee might be since he had only some fifty or so forints and would be very sorry if he were to be refused entrance for lack of a few coins. The fellow beside him gave not the slightest sign of having heard any of this confused muttering but kept glaring at the rear of the truck with such awful intensity and seemed so oblivious to all the hubbub round him that even Valuska was rapidly forced to the conclusion that whatever the question, there was absolutely no chance of an answer from the man. At first Valuska was simply aware of a sudden tension in the crowd, then, following the direction of their gaze, he could see the corrugated tin of the truck’s rear door descending, and two fat hands—probably the ones that had clipped it there in the first place from within—sliding it down, then abruptly letting it go halfway through its descent, so when the bottom of it hit the pavement and the side struck the rim there was a tremendous clatter. Valuska, who had been swept to the front of the crowd as it pressed towards the opening, was not at all surprised to find that the whale’s domicile could apparently be opened only from the inside, for, or so he reasoned to begin with, one would naturally expect a company so unusual—and this lot certainly seemed unusual—to come up with a curious solution to such a problem. Furthermore, above and beyond all this, his attention was drawn to a great mountain of flesh, well over six feet high, standing in the now clear ‘entrance’ of the circus, a figure whose role was apparent not only from the fact that despite the intense cold he wore nothing but a dirty vest over his bulging and hairy torso (a ‘factotum’ would in any case be expected to dislike the heat), but from his badly disfigured and generally squashed nose, the effect of which was not so much fierce as foolish, lending him an air of surprising innocence. He raised his arms high into the air, gave a loud grunt as if he had just woken from a long sleep, dropped lightly down among the crowd gathered about the opening, dragged the corrugated sheet reluctantly to one side and propped the battered object up against the truck, then, having lowered three wide wooden boards from the platform, he got out of the way, grabbed hold of a flat metal box and started selling tickets with an expression of such utter weariness and boredom it seemed that neither the line of customers shuffling up the rather shaky ramp nor the almost unbearably tense air of expectancy was of the slightest interest to him; heaven or hell, what’s the difference, as people in those parts used to say. Valuska stood in the line quivering with excitement, clearly enjoying everything: audience, wagon, the iron box, the ticket collector. With a grateful glance at the indifferent behemoth before him he thanked the ticket collector as he took his ticket, relieved that his purse would bear the expense, tried once more to enter into conversation with his ever changing neighbours, then, when his turn finally came round, he too picked his way carefully across the creaking boards, and stepped into the half-lit enormous vacancy of the ‘whale-house’. On a low platform of beams and girders, precisely as the hand-written sign hung on its side proclaimed, lay the terrifying hulk of a ‘sensational blahval’, though any attempt to read the rest of the tiny chalked inscription and thus enlighten oneself as to what exactly a ‘blahval’ might be was bound to result in failure since anyone wishing to hesitate before it was carried forward by the slow press of the crowd behind. The huge creature facing him needed neither pointing out nor rational explanation; Valuska muttered the mysterious name under his breath as he took in the far from common sight, open-mouthed, gaping, with a mixture of fear and wonder. Seeing the whale did not mean he could grasp the full meaning of the sight, since to comprehend the enormous tail fin, the dried, cracked, steel-grey carapace and, halfway down the strangely bloated hulk, the top fin, which alone measured several metres, appeared a singularly hopeless task. It was just too big and too long: Valuska simply couldn’t see it all at once, and failed even to get a proper look at its dead eyes. Having managed to insert himself into the continually shuffling line, he finally reached the creature’s jaws, which were ingeniously displayed wide open, but whether he stared down its dark throat, or tore his gaze away to survey its exterior to discover the two tiny eyes sunk in deep sockets on either side of the body, and noted the two vents in the lower brow above them, he was aware of seeing these things in isolation: it was simply impossible to see the enormous head as an integral whole. It was hard to see properly in any case since the overhead lights had not been switched on, and to stop and enjoy the horror at one’s leisure, to
appreciate the mouth so terrifyingly displayed or the vast unmoving tongue inside it, was impossible, though it wasn’t so much the mouth, nor the sheer incomprehensible size of the creature that most astonished him, but the full and certain general knowledge purveyed by the publicity that it had witnessed the wonders of an infinitely strange and infinitely distant world, that this gentle yet terrifying denizen of great seas and oceans was actually here, and one could even take the liberty of touching it. Despite all this, while Valuska stood surprisingly undisturbed in his happy stupor, the others—who continued trudging compliantly round the whale in the stinking gloom—not only showed no signs of being similarly affected but gave the decided impression that the highly visible object of the advertisements itself was of limited interest. True, they cast a few sheepish glances at the petrified giant stranded in the middle, glances which did not entirely lack the proper element of apprehensive respect, but their eyes were restless, skipping about with terror and desire, scanning the entire extent of the wagon, as if there were something else to be found, some hypothetical presence, the very prospect of which would surpass all their expectations. Not that there was anything in that hostile environment, made even less hospitable by whatever light entered it, to encourage such expectations. Just inside the door, on one side of the line, stood a few metal lockers, one of which was open, revealing eight or ten bottles of formalin containing a few wrinkled sad-looking tiny embryos of which no one, not even Valuska, took any notice, and the other end of the wagon was curtained off, though there was one rather large chink through which one could see that there was nothing of any great interest there either, save a basin and a jug of water. Lastly, directly opposite the cavern of the creature’s open mouth, there was a door in the corrugated partition dividing off the rear of the compartment (albeit another door without a handle), a door which might possibly lead to some sort of bedroom for the staff, and though it was here rather than anywhere else that the crowd showed the most obvious signs of excitement, Valuska, if he had noticed any of this at all, would not have understood the reasons for such peculiar behaviour. This was futile speculation in any case for, being completely mesmerized by the whale, Valuska saw nothing but the whale, and having surveyed the far side of the fabulous object and found himself in the open air once more, descending with comparative safety from the high platform, he even failed to register that those who had preceded him in the line and had already been through the experience once were even now returning to the place from which they had all but started, as if, despite having seen the whale, the many hours of waiting had somehow not quite achieved the purpose for which it was intended. It failed to register with him—maybe precisely because he himself had determined to return in the evening in order to solve before anyone else the haunting phenomenon of this strange company with its extraordinarily patient votaries—and so, unlike the night porter, whom he greeted with a cheery wave, he viewed the spectacle as something that far surpassed itself as a circus exhibition, and when the former addressed him in a hoarse whisper, asking, ‘Here, tell me what’s in there … People are talking about aristocracy of some sort …’he fitted the question to his own line of thought and answered him enthusiastically, saying, ‘No, Mr Árgyelán, sir! It’s a grander thing altogether, I assure you! This is regal, positively regal!’ and, cheeks glowing, abruptly left the puzzled gentleman to his astonishment. Clutching his bag to his chest, he squeezed his way through the crowd, and now that he sensed that it was past twelve o’clock, it being a Wednesday, and Mrs Eszter waiting with the ‘laundry bag’, he decided to return home and deal with that, there being enough time to deliver the papers later in the afternoon. So he set out for Híd Road—not suspecting that he would have been better employed in making a dash for it out of town to some distant place of refuge—pacing quickly and stopping dead every so often to take a conspiratorial squint at the sky, soon completing the short distance home and seeing again and again before him, unfocused yet somehow in its entirety, that innocent carcass vaster than imagination which even now filled up his mind, and left him thinking, ‘How enormous! … How extraordinary a creation! … What a deeply mysterious person the Creator must be to amuse Himself with such extraordinary creatures!’ so that, proceeding along this line of thought, it wasn’t long before he had recovered the high ground of his early-morning meditations and could begin to associate them with his experiences in the market square, and, without a word, listening only to the unbroken murmurous dialogue in the depths of his soul, arrive at some conception of the way in which the gentle yet final gestures of the almighty Creator in the act of judgement succeeded in carefully relating His own omnipotence to untold billions of His creatures, right down to the terrifying yet entertaining spectacle of the whale. Now with bowed head, now with head uplifted examining the sky in his characteristic way so that he might once more be wholly absorbed by the silent joy of realizing that everything that existed was linked in some fraternal manner, as part of a single thought, to everything else … he sped past the apparently unpeopled houses of Híd Road. He sped on, propelled across the melancholy silence of Vilmos Ápor Square, down Dürer Street, chilled to the marrow, or rather, somehow overtook himself or divided himself into two, one part speeding on below, the other flying away, gaining height, as if he knew that a crash-landing or sudden petrifying stillness was what awaited him, for when he turned into the gateway of Harrer’s house and ran down the path leading to the old laundry room to push open the door, he was astonished to find someone already there, someone who looked up at him and, presumably disapproving of his ‘radiant expression’, without any preliminaries, rounded on him, demanding: ‘Tell me, why must you go round with that idiotic look on your face? Wouldn’t it be better to lock your door properly? It’s an open invitation to a burglar!’ Since her usual practice was to leave the bag at Harrer’s or to give it to him without crossing the threshold, and not (definitely not!) to come and pass the time of day with him, the unexpected sight of Mrs Eszter, his awesome ‘accomplice’, here among his battered possessions—especially now when her face glowed beetroot red and was veritably swollen with fury on account of the fact—or so it transpired—that she had been waiting there since morning—was almost too much for Valuska, and he flew into such confusion that he genuinely had no idea where he was or what he was doing. Dizzied by this unsought honour and by his own too rapid descent from the empyrean, he blushed from ear to ear with embarrassment (since, for lack of a chair, Mrs Eszter had been forced to install herself on his bed) and hastened to sweep the remnant breadcrust, the lard in its greaseproof wrapper, the empty tin and various onion skins off the stool and on to the floor, then—under the hostile glare of his guest, who was watching him ensconce himself on the freshly cleaned and only available resource for sitting on—tried to kick a few stray socks under the cupboard without her noticing and, with an idiotic grin, attempted to remove a filthy pair of underpants from the bed itself. Whatever he touched, however, far from improving the situation, only served to expose ever more clearly the irredeemable condition of the room, though he refused to give up his hopeless struggle with the mouldy apple core in the corner, the cigarette butts surrounding the oil-stove that were tell-tale signs of Mr Harrer’s visits, and the wardrobe door that refused to close, until Mrs Eszter noticed that he wasn’t paying ‘the blindest bit of attention’ to what she was saying, and angrily screeched at him, commanding him to ‘stop that right now!’ and sit down at last, since she had something extremely important to tell him. There were so many thoughts whirling round his head that for a few minutes he couldn’t even begin to pick up what the well-known grating voice was saying; he kept nodding and blinking and clearing his throat, and while his guest ranted on, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, about ‘the days to come’ and ‘the heavy judgement waiting on the world’, getting quite carried away, he was incapable of responding except by staring at the stool with a fixed expression of ardent agreement on his face. Under the circumstances it didn’t take long for
Mrs Eszter suddenly to turn and focus her attention on him, though the little he had begun to comprehend by this time was in any case far from reassuring. For while he was genuinely pleased to learn that his mother and his guest had ‘parted as good friends’ the night before (since his hopes immediately rose that with some assistance from her he might succeed in pacifying Mrs Plauf), he was alarmed at her plan, according to which ‘because of the increasing amount of paperwork and the publicity associated with her new position’ Mrs Eszter was to move, ‘this very day’, from her currently necessary sub-tenancy back home again, and that he was to send her clothes ahead, ‘thereby exposing the long-term shady arrangement obtaining between her husband and the laundry’, for he was not in the slightest doubt that the delicate health of his elderly and even now rather over-sensitive friend, who trembled at the very mention of his wife’s name, would be severely jeopardized by the impending events. And since it was equally plain to see that all his hard work in attempting to nurse Mr Eszter back to full health as well as improve his conditions of work would come to nothing should his partner succeed in accomplishing her ends, and that it would be very hard indeed to prevent her doing so, it came as a great relief to him when—having mentioned, in passing so to speak, the establishment of a new political movement, and that local people wanted György Eszter and no one else to lead it—she added that since such a significant appointment would bring great honour with it, she would be the happiest and proudest of wives if he were to accept the position (an acceptance, she whispered, that would naturally entail postponement of her plans to move, for if her husband were to carry such a load of responsibility, a load far greater than hers, she wouldn’t for a moment dream of disturbing him), the only problem being that she, Mrs Eszter, unlike Mrs Plauf, she added with a resigned gesture, who felt that the whole matter should be left immediately to Valuska, who was bound to ensure its success, ‘… that I,’ she went on, ‘knowing my husband’s delicate state of health and retiring disposition, have serious doubts as to whether he would accept the arrangement’. Realizing at last what she was on about, Valuska didn’t know what pleased him more—the fact that his mother had perfectly understandably of course, despite her misgivings, turned to him (‘Immediately!’) to resolve this complicated state of affairs, or that Mrs Eszter should reveal a quite unexpected side of her character through an act of such dazzling self-sacrifice. What was quite certain, however, was that he grew highly excited at the thought, leapt to his feet in an excess of enthusiasm and ran about the room attempting to convince his visitor that he ‘would undertake the task’ and do all he could ‘to ensure its success’, an outburst that provoked the generally solemn and severe-looking woman to brief but sincere laughter. This laughter did not signify immediate assent and the guest was persuaded to accept Valuska’s offer only after considerable argument and exhortation, and even having apprised him in the vaguest, most impenetrable terms of all of ‘the essential facts about the movement’, and listed on a piece of paper the names of those ‘whose work and agitprop skills the incoming president should begin to employ this very afternoon’, she proved unbending in the matter of the suitcase and the message, to the extent that once they emerged from behind Harrer’s front door and were proceeding down Dürer Street in the frost which had not abated though it was almost noon, and Valuska was regaling her with an account of the ‘marvellous performance’ in Kossuth Square, she heard him through with total indifference and talked only about the suitcase and the details of her move—and even as they reached the corner of Jókai Street and were on the point of parting, she insisted on repeating that if Valuska did not arrive by four o’clock in the afternoon with word of her husband’s unequivocal agreement, she, Mrs Eszter, would do as she had originally intended, and ‘eat her supper at Béla Wenckheim Avenue’. So saying, she turned on her heels and was away on ‘urgent business’ as she put it, leaving Valuska, with a suitcase full of laundry in one hand and a note in the other, staring after her for almost a full minute, much moved by the certain knowledge that if his old friend had ever doubted ‘the true worth of this exemplary woman’, this act, which was a sure sign of her good-will and readiness to sacrifice her own interests to his, would be enough to convince him. For it was now as clear as day to him whom it was she respected in that apparently harsh and imperious soul of hers, clear from the moment she first sought him out to inform him that henceforth, if Valuska was willing to keep it a secret, she would like to wash her husband’s dirty laundry with ‘her own two hands’, explaining how, through all the preceding years, she had regarded the husband who had so coldly rejected her with such unconditional fidelity and respect that it saturated her entire being. And when he suddenly realized what his guest desired to achieve with this transparent ruse of ‘moving back home’, to wit that she was willing to trust him and persuade him to take part in a political movement, which for all he knew she might have organized with the express purpose of manifesting the wondrous ‘qualities’ of György Eszter before the entire populace, he felt more certain than ever that the lonely occupant of the house in Wenckheim Avenue would no longer be able to resist her extraordinary persistence and would be forced to admit his helplessness in the face of such consuming passion. There was something of a gale blowing up and when he set off he had to fight against the icy blast which wanted to take his breath away; the suitcase was heavy and growing heavier by the minute, the road was slippery and packs of impertinent stray cats lounged lazily before him, slow to clear a way for him, but nothing could disturb his good spirits: he was sure that he had never before set out for his master’s house with such a wealth of good tidings. Today, everything would turn out for the better, because it had been for this that he had set out every day, ever since Mrs Eszter first left the house, since, as carrier of the daily dinner, he had got to know the residence and its solemn master, but, above all, ever since ‘the musicologist, the full extent of whose researches and general importance was as yet hidden from the town, and who endeavoured to hide these gifts through the strict isolation demanded by his sheer modesty, who, furthermore, was practically bed-bound through his physical suffering, this fabulous personage to whom exceptional respect was due’ had, to his utmost amazement, one day declared that he regarded him to be his friend. And though he was at a loss to understand how he had qualified himself for his friendship and why Mr Eszter did not elect some other person to be the recipient of this distinction (someone capable of accurately grasping and noting the motions of his mind, motions that, as he himself admitted, he understood only vaguely at best), from that day forth he felt it was his responsibility to rescue him from the deadly slough of bitterness and disillusion which threatened to engulf not only him but the entire town. Contrary to what anyone might think, it had not escaped Valuska’s notice, the evidence being so readily available, that everyone he met was preoccupied by the notion of ‘the collapse into anarchy’, a state that, in the general opinion, was no longer avoidable. Everyone was talking about ‘the unstoppable stampede into chaos’, the ‘unpredictability of daily life’ and ‘the approaching catastrophe’ without a clear notion of the full weight of these frightening words, since, he surmised, this epidemic of fear was not born out of some genuine, daily increasing certainty of disaster but of an infection of the imagination whose susceptibility to its own terrors might eventually lead to an actual catastrophe, in other words the false premonition that a man who had lost his bearings might succumb to once the inner structure of his life, the way his joints and bones were knit, had loosened and he carelessly transgressed the ancestral laws of his soul—if he simply lost control of his undemeaningly ordered world … It bothered him greatly that however he tried to persuade his friends of this they refused to listen to him, but it saddened him most when in tones of unrelieved gloom they proclaimed that the period they were living in was ‘an unfathomable hell between a treacherous future and an unmemorable past’, for such awful thoughts reminded him of the sentiments and unremittingly painful mon
ologues he was used to hearing on a daily basis in the house on Béla Wenckheim Avenue, which was where he had just arrived. Even more depressing than this was that, however he would have liked to, it was impossible to deny that Mr Eszter—blessed as he was with the most refined poetic sensibility, incomparable delicacy and indeed all the great gifts of the spirit—who, as a clear sign of friendship never failed to spend at least half an hour playing—to him, with his tin ear!—passages from the famous Bach—was the most disillusioned of all, and while he put much of this down to the general debility occasioned by his illness and the oppressive monotony of being bed-bound, he blamed himself entirely for the extended convalescence and could only hope that if he carried out his duties ever more carefully, ever more thoroughly, eventually there might be the prospect of a complete recovery, and his great friend might finally be free of the darkness occasioned by the ‘apparently inoperable cataracts’ of his soul. He never stopped believing that the moment might arrive, and now, as he entered the house and negotiated the long book-lined hall, and considered whether to begin his account with events associated with the dawn, the whale or Mrs Eszter, he felt the period of convalescence might be finally over, that that ardently wished-for moment of full recovery might actually be at hand. He stopped before the familiar door, transferred the heavy case to his other hand and thought of that uplifting all-forgiving light that—should that moment have arrived—was waiting to shine upon Mr Eszter. Because there would be something worth seeing then, something worth discovering—he knocked three times as was his custom—since he would then be granted a vision of that incorruptible order, under whose aegis a boundless and beautiful power comprehended in one harmonious whole the dry land and the sea, the walkers and the sailors, heaven and earth, water and air and all those who lived in mutual dependence, whose life was just opening out or already flying by; he would see that birth and death were only two tremendous moments in an eternal waking, and his face would glow with amazement as he understood this; he would feel—gently he grasped the copper handle of the door—the warmth of the mountains, woods, rivers and valleys, would discover the hidden depths of human existence, would finally understand that the unbreakable ties that bound him to the world were not imprisoning chains and condemnation but a kind of clinging to an indestructible sense that he had a home; and he would discover the enormous joys of mutuality which embraced and animated everything: rain, wind, sun and snow, the flight of a bird, the taste of fruit, the scent of grass; and he would suspect that his anxieties and bitterness were merely cumbersome ballast required by the live roots of his past and the rising airship of his certain future, and, then—he started opening the door—he would finally know that our every moment is passed in a procession across dawns and day’s-ends of the orbiting earth, across successive waves of winter and summer, threading the planets and the stars. Suitcase in hand, he stepped into the room and stood there blinking in the half-light.
The Melancholy of Resistance Page 5