He stopped in the half-light, smiling in confusion, and, since Eszter was all too well acquainted with his pathetic and overwrought emotional state on arrival, he calmed him, gesturing, as if by way of greeting, in a manner impossible to refuse, that he should take his customary place at the table used for smoking, thaw himself out after his frosty journey and wait for the fire of his enthusiasm to die down while his old friend amused him with a few well-chosen observations. ‘We won’t be having any more snow then,’ he began without preamble, delighted to continue his previous, solitary train of thought, thereby subsuming all the things that had preoccupied him since morning once the time allowed for washing and dressing had elapsed and Mrs Harrer had, to his greatest relief, departed, ‘as one might boldly state judging from the state of the world at this moment in time’. It would not have been his style to get up and check the validity of such an authoritative statement with his own eyes, to ask the excited visitor currently sitting in the armchair to draw the heavy curtains, stare at the melancholy empty street and observe sheets of newsprint running before swirling waves of icy wind and paper bags passionately swooping between tomb-like houses frozen into silence, in a word to look out on his behalf, for to look out through the enormous windows clearly intended for better days was, in his opinion—he being a master of resistance to redundant gesture—utterly pointless since an act in itself could never be worthwhile given that the question to which it appeared to provide an answer was probably the wrong question, therefore the only question of any importance on waking, to wit whether it was snowing outside or not, could be settled just as well from his present position on the bed facing away from the firmly curtained casement windows, for the peace associated with Christmas, the happy ringing of bells, the very snow itself was somehow forgotten in this eternal winter—if this harsh regime of penetrating cold, when the last, light passion of his own existence was to decide what was to face ruin first: the house or its inhabitant, could be called winter at all. As regards the former, it was still standing after a fashion, despite the fact that Mrs Harrer, who was hired to light the fire at dawn—and no more—came round once a week under the guise of cleaning and, armed with her broom and the rags she called her dusters, set about the house to such effect that she seemed to be trying to accomplish inside that which the frost was very effectively doing outside: she flapped about violently with the rag; lithe and ready for combat, time and again, with inimitable ill-luck, she assailed the hall, the kitchen, the dining room and the rooms at the back; week after week, while little ornaments showered about her, she went about her scrubbing with generous lashings of water and shoved around sensitive pieces of furniture with cracked surfaces and highly unstable legs; in the name of cleaning she occasionally broke a piece or two of the delicate Viennese and Berliner dinner service, so he might reward her good intentions—much to the decided satisfaction of local antique dealers—with a silver spoon or a volume bound in leather; in other words she swept and wiped and washed and tidied everything so remorselessly that the poor building, attacked both inside and out and by now in a perilous state, offered only one place of refuge where things might remain as they used to be—the spacious drawing room, where this ‘ham-fisted champion of domestic order’ (‘Disturb the director at his work? Certainly not!’) never dared to enter. Of course it was impossible to tell her to stop and occupy herself solely with that for which she was paid, for apart from the implied rudeness this might involve—and Eszter always avoided having to give orders or indeed anything that smacked of decision—it was clear that the woman, even if she could not gain access to him or his immediate surroundings, driven as she was by some mysterious force of charity, felt obliged to enter the bitter lists of battle against whatever objects still remained unbroken and would continue even if she were expressly forbidden, a predicament that offered the owner no option but the safe harbour of his own drawing room, which was not altogether an imposition since here he could be understood to pursue the alleged musicological research which enhanced his reputation in the town, and since this misconception kept Mrs Harrer at bay he had no cause to fear for the delicate ornaments and furnishings immediately surrounding him, and, what was more, could be certain that owing to this fortunate misapprehension nothing would disturb him in his real mission, which he referred to as his ‘strategic withdrawal in face of the pathetic stupidity of so-called human progress’. The stove with its graceful copper feet was ‘merrily blazing’ as they say, and as it happens, this was the only item in the room which did not immediately betray the fact that time had terminally ravaged it: for the once-splendid Persian rugs, the silk wallpaper, the useless chandelier dangling from the cracked ceiling rose, the two carved armchairs, the settee, the marble-covered smoking table, the etched mirror, the dull, precarious Steinway and the countless cushions, tapestries, pieces of porcelain bric-à-brac, all these inherited memorials of the family drawing room, each and every one of them, had long ago given up the hopeless struggle and the only thing that prevented them from crumbling and disintegrating where they stood was, in all likelihood, the ten years’ worth of dust that thickly insulated them and, perhaps, his own mild, permanent, practically stationary presence. Continued presence and involuntary vigilance, however, do not in themselves constitute a state of health nor a particularly powerful assertion of the life-force, since, after all, the most funereal of positions was undoubtedly taken by the faithful occupant of the once ornamental chaise-longue which had been dragged some time ago from one of the bedrooms, by that man lying on high plumped pillows whose practically skeletal body could only with the greatest of charity be described as gaunt, whose ruinous condition testified less to the understandable revolt of the organs than to the constant protest against the powers that attempted to slow the natural if violent process of deterioration and the spirit that had mercilessly condemned itself, for reasons of its own, to a life of ease. He lay on the bed, motionless, his hands resting exhausted on the moth-eaten blanket in a perfect image of his by-now-stable constitution, which was not in the grip of some slow progressive disorder of the bones such as Scheiermann’s Disease, nor under the threat of a sudden, potentially fatal infection, but had suffered a complete collapse, the serious consequence of allowing the muscles, the skin and the appetite to degenerate through permanent self-confinement to bed. It was the body’s protest against the soft entrapments of pillow and rug, though it would be equally true to say that this was all it was, for the wilful regime of rest which nowadays only Valuska’s visits and the usual morning and night-time rituals managed to break, that final withdrawal from the world of action and sociability, had no effect upon his determination and steadfastness of soul. The carefully groomed grey hair, the clipped moustache, the severe harmonization of his well-matched daily garments, all betrayed as much: the hems of the trousers, the starched shirt, the meticulously knotted tie and the deep maroon dressing gown, but, above all, the still-bright pale-blue eyes set in that pale face, eyes still razor sharp which had only to sweep over his decaying circumstances and his own body to register his highly efficient personal preservation and detect the tiniest signs of deterioration beneath the vulnerable surface of his charming and graceful possessions, which, he could clearly see, were all woven of the same ephemeral fabric of form as himself. And it was not only the common condition of self and domain that he perceived with such acuity, but the deep sense of kinship that undoubtedly existed between the deathly calm of the room and the lifeless cold of the world outside: the sky, like some remorseless mirror, always reflecting the same world, dully turning back the sadness that rose in billows beneath it, and in the twilight, which every day grew a little darker, showed the bare pollarded chestnut trees in the moment before their final uprooting, bent before the biting wind; the trunk-roads were deserted, the streets empty, ‘as if only stray cats and rats and a few pigs living on scraps’ remained, while beyond the town, the bleak deserted plains of the lowlands questioned even the steady gaze of reason that attempted to pe
netrate them—this sadness, this twilight, this barrenness and desolation, could all be said to have found an equivalent in Eszter’s drawing room with its desert-places, in the all-consuming rays emitted by the fixed dogma which united nausea, disillusion and the bed-bound routine, rays that could penetrate the armour of both form and surface, to wreck the fabric and substance; the wood and cloth, the glass and steel, of everything from floor to ceiling. ‘No, we shan’t have any more snow,’ he declared again, casting a placid, calming glance at the nervous visitor wriggling impatiently in his chair, and leaned forward to smooth ruffles in the blanket covering his feet. ‘No more snow.’ He sank back on his pillows. ‘Snow production has come to an end, therefore not one solitary drop will ever fall again, and, as you well know, my friend,’ he added, ‘between ourselves, that is the least of it …’ So saying, he waved his hand once in a single careless gesture, for he had already employed that same mild gesture countless times before to express the same thought: the fatal early frost that had descended on a dry autumn with its terrifying loss of precipitation (‘Ah, happy years, when it came down in buckets!’) could mean only one thing, sure as the toxin, the undeniable fact that nature herself had laid down her tools and finished her regular task, that the once-brotherly bond between heaven and earth was well and truly broken, and that the last act had assuredly begun wherein we were orbiting alone among the scattered detritus of our laws and ‘would soon be left staring, as fate had decreed, idiotically, uncomprehendingly, watching and shivering as the light steadily withdrew from us’. Every morning, as she was leaving, Mrs Harrer would stop at the partly opened door and unfailingly regale him with increasingly improbable horror stories, now of the water-tower that was clearly wobbling, now of the cogwheels that spontaneously began to turn in the belfry of the church in the main square (today, as it happened, she had chattered about ‘a gang of desperadoes’ and about some tree that had been uprooted in Hétvezér Passage), though he himself no longer considered these events at all improbable, and did not doubt for a moment that the tidings—despite the congenital stupidity of the messenger—were in every respect true, since for him these were absolute confirmation of that which he could not have helped guessing: the chain of cause and effect and hence the notion of predictability were both of them illusions, ‘therefore the clear light of reason was forever obscured’. ‘It’s all up with us,’ Eszter continued, his gaze slowly trawling round the room before focusing meditatively on the stove with its flying, quickly fading sparks. ‘We have failed in our thoughts, our actions and our imaginations, even in our pitiful attempts to understand why we have failed; we have lost our God, forfeited the socially restraining forms of respect owing to honour and rank, neglected to maintain our nobly misplaced belief in the eternal laws of proportion which enabled us to estimate our true worth by relating it to the degree of our failure to measure up to the ten commandments … in other words we have come a cropper, come a painful cropper in the universe which, it appears, has ever less to offer us. If one is to believe the babblings of Mrs Harrer,’ he smiled at Valuska, who was vacillating between utterance and rapt attention, ‘people are talking about apocalypse and the last judgement, because they do not know that there will be neither apocalypse nor last judgement … such things would serve no purpose since the world will quite happily fall apart by itself and go to wrack and ruin so that everything may begin again, and so proceed ad infinitum, and this is as perfectly clear,’ he raised his eyes to the ceiling, ‘as our helpless orbiting in space: once started it cannot be stopped.’ Eszter shut his eyes. ‘I’m feeling dizzy; I’m dizzy and, God forgive me, bored, like everyone else who has succeeded in ridding himself of the notion that there is any suggestion of rhyme or reason in making or breaking, in birth or death, in this constant and agonizing going round in circles, postulating some enormous wonderful plan rather than a cold, mechanical, blindingly simple movement … That once perhaps … in the remote past … there might have been some feeling to the contrary,’ he cast another glance at the wriggling figure of his guest, ‘is, of course, possible, but today, in this vale of tears come all too true, it might be better for us to keep silent on the subject, at least to leave the hazy memory of the being that set all this in motion to fade away in peace. Better to keep silent,’ he repeated in slightly more ringing tones, ‘and not speculate about our late creator’s no doubt exalted purposes, for as to guessing how we might best have directed them we have guessed quite enough, and clearly haven’t got anywhere in the process. We have got nowhere in this nor in anything else, because, as it is appropriate at this juncture to point out, we have not been over-generously blessed with the desirable gift of clear sight; the all-consuming over-active curiosity with which we have time and again assailed the sensible world has, not to put too fine a point on it, been far from a resounding success, and when, on the odd occasion, we have discovered some piddling secret we have immediately had cause to regret it. If you will forgive a joke in poor taste,’ he wiped his brow, ‘picture the first man to throw a stone. I throw it up, it comes down again, how splendid, he might have thought. But what really happened? I throw it up, it comes down, it strikes me on the head. The lesson is: experiment, but with caution,’ Eszter gently admonished his friend. ‘Better to be satisfied with the meagre but at least harmless truth, the validity of which we all, excepting of course your own angelic self, may prove upon our pulses; the truth that, when it comes down to it, we are simply the miserable subjects of some insignificant failure, alone in this simply marvellous creation; that the whole of human history is no more, if I may make myself clear to you, than the histrionics of a stupid, bloody, miserable outcast in an obscure corner of a vast stage, a kind of tortured confession of error, a slow acknowledgement of the painful fact that this creation was not necessarily a brilliant success.’ He reached for the glass on his bedside table, took a gulp of water, and glanced enquiringly at the armchair, establishing, not without a certain anxiety, that his faithful visitor, who had long outgrown the domestic role of selfless general help, was more than usually restless today. Clutching the suitcase full of clothes with one hand and a small slip of paper with the other, Valuska looked as if he were cowering in his own shadow or nestling between the spread petals of his never-to-be-removed postman’s cloak as the mild and sober shower of Eszter’s words fell upon him; and he was obviously more and more confused about what he should do. It seemed to Eszter that he was trying to decide whether to yield to his attentive and sympathetic nature and hear his elderly friend through without interrupting him or, rather, to follow his usual habit and, as if by way of relief, immediately give vent to the sense of wonder that overtook him as he walked like an angel through the night- and dawn-silenced streets—and as it was clearly impossible to assent to both impulses at once, Eszter was no longer surprised to see the early signs of such confusion in him. He was used to Valuska’s entrances, to see him swept through the door on a wave of agitation—it was an entrance hallowed by tradition—and accepted the fact that ‘till Valuska could master his inexpressible joy at one or other cosmic phenomenon’ it was up to Eszter to entertain his guest with his own brand of bitter and severely critical humour. This was how it had been between them for years: Eszter talked, Valuska listened, until the moment when the expression on his disciple’s face softened and gave way to the first gentle smile, when the host would be delighted to hand over to his guest, since it was not the content, only the initially passionate manner of his young friend whose answers were full of such ‘wonderful blindness and unsullied charm’ that ever disturbed him. It was one long unbroken story related in the stuttering and excitable prose his visitor had regaled him with each noon and every late afternoon for the last eight years, an endless fantasia of the planets and the stars, the sunlight, the ever-turning shadows, and the silent mechanism of the heavenly bodies orbiting overhead, which provided ‘silent proof of the existence of an ineffable intellect’ and had enchanted him all his life as he stared into the eventuall
y over-clouded firmament on his eternal wanderings. For his part, Eszter chose not to make any objective comment on such cosmic matters, though he often joked about the ‘perpetual orbiting’ as if by way of light relief (‘No wonder,’ he once winked exaggeratedly in the direction of the armchair, ‘that after thousands of years of the earth spinning about its axis people should find themselves somewhat disorientated, since their whole attention is devoted to simply remaining on their feet …’), though later he desisted even from such interventions, regarding them as thoughtless, not only because he feared destroying Valuska’s delicate and brittle vision of the universe, but because he believed it might be a mistake to attribute the sad condition of humanity past or to come to the ‘otherwise genuinely unpleasant enough’ necessity of mankind rambling aimlessly through the universe since time immemorial. In the ascending hierarchy of their conversations, the subject of the heavens therefore lay wholly in Valuska’s territory, and this was, in every sense, fair enough: quite apart from the age-old impossibility of seeing the heavens at all through such dense clouds (so dense that even to refer to them would have been a little untactful), he was convinced that Valuska’s cosmos had no relation whatsoever to the real one; it was, he thought, an image, something remembered from childhood perhaps, only an image, of some once-glimpsed universal order, an order that had become a personal domain, clearly a luminous landscape that could never be lost, a pure religion which assumed that there was or might once have been a heavenly mechanism ‘driven by some hidden motor of enchantment and innocent dreaming’. While the local community ‘given its natural inclination’ regarded Valuska as no more than an idiot, he, for his part, was in no doubt (though he only became aware of this once Valuska took on the role of his personal meal-provider and general help) that this apparently crazy wanderer on the highways of his own transparent galaxy, with his incorruptibility and universal, if embarrassing, generosity of spirit, was indeed ‘proof that, despite the highly corrosive forces of decadence in the present age, angels nevertheless did exist’. One superfluous phenomenon, however, Eszter immediately added, did not indicate merely that people had ceased to note and were actively neglecting such beings, but that, in his own view, the refined sensibilities and spirit of observation that registered such generosity and incorruptibility as distinct virtues and ornaments did so in the certain knowledge that there was nothing, nor ever was anything, to which such virtue might refer or quality ornament, or, to put it another way, that it referred to or ornamented some singular, useless and undemonstrable form—like some kind of excess or overflow—for which ‘neither explanation, nor apology’ existed. He loved him as a lonely lepidopterist might love a rare butterfly; he loved the harmless ethereal nature of Valuska’s imagined cosmos, and he shared his own thoughts with him—about the earth naturally, which, too, in its way, passed all understanding—because beyond the guarantee of goodwill which the regular visits of his young friend represented, which guarded him ‘against the unavoidable dangers of madness resulting from complete isolation’, this one-man audience provided him with constant proof, which confirmed, beyond all doubt, the redundancy of the angelic—and absolved him of responsibility for the possibly corrupting effects of his own solemn and deeply rational views, since his painfully constructed and precise sentences bounced off the shield of Valuska’s faith as if they were the lightest of darts, or simply went straight through him without touching a nerve or causing the slightest injury. Of course, he couldn’t be absolutely sure of this, for while it was hard enough in the regular run of things to establish what Valuska’s attention was focused on, it was clear that this time his own words had no calming effect and that the most obvious causes of his nervousness were the case and the torn sheet of note-paper in his hand. Who knows whether Eszter immediately comprehended the reasons for this continuous tension, or had any notion of the import of the piece of paper Valuska was nervously clutching and twisting between his fingers, but he suspected, even on the basis of such slender evidence, that his visitor had called on him in the office of messenger rather than friend, and, since he was horrified by the sheer idea of something addressed to him or anything that might amount to a communication, he quickly replaced his glass on the bedside table, and—if only to preserve the peace of his mind and prevent Valuska speaking—pursued his own broken train of thought with a gentle but unremitting insistence. ‘While, on the one hand,’ he said, ‘our most prominent scientists, the inexhaustible heroes of this perennial confusion, have finally and somewhat unfortunately extricated themselves from the metaphor of godhead, they have immediately fallen into the trap of regarding this oppressive history as some kind of triumphant march, a supernatural progress following, what they call, the victory of “will and intellect”, and though, as you know, I am no longer capable of being the least surprised by this, I must confess to you I still cannot understand why it should be the cause of such universal celebration for them that we have climbed out of the trees. Do they think it’s good like this? I find nothing amusing in it. Furthermore it doesn’t fit us properly: you only have to consider how long, even after thousands of years of practice, we can keep going on two legs. Half a day, my dear friend, and we shouldn’t forget it. As for learning to stand upright, allow me to cite myself as example, specifically the natural history of my illness, the course of which, as you yourself know, is to deteriorate to a condition known as Bechterew’s Disease (a process my doctor, the wise Dr Provaznyik, regards as unavoidable), and that I must therefore resign myself to the fact that I must spend the remainder of my life in one simple back position, that, in short, I should continue to live, should I live at all, in a cramped and, in the strict sense of the word, stooping posture thereby atoning for and sensibly suffering the serious consequences of our thoughtlessness in assuming an erect position sometime in the remote past … Straightening up and walking on two legs therefore, my dear friend, are the symbolic starting points for our ugly historical progress, and, to tell you the truth, I am not hopeful,’ Eszter sadly shook his head, ‘that we are capable of concluding in any nobler a manner, since we regularly waste any slight chance we might have of that, as, for example, in the case of the moon landings, which, in their time, might have pointed to a more stylish farewell, and which made a great impression on me, until, soon enough, Armstrong and the others having duly returned, I had to admit the whole thing was only a mirage and my expectations vain, since the beauty of every single—however breathtaking—attempt was in some way marred by the fact these pioneers of the cosmic adventure, for reasons wholly incomprehensible to me, having landed on the moon and realized that they were no longer on earth, failed to remain there. And I, you know, to tell you the truth … well, I’d go anywhere to be out of this.’ Eszter’s voice had dropped to a whisper and he shut his eyes as if he were imagining embarking on some ultimate cosmic flight. One could not state with any great certainty that the magical attraction of this journey through space, a longer sojourn in cavernous vastness, would have dulled his appetite, yet it never lasted for more than a few seconds at a time, and though he refused to dilute the acidity of his last remark he couldn’t leave it hanging there in all its over-hasty rawness. Not to mention the fact that the temptations of this symbolic voyage were already, at the very moment of their conception, turned upside down (‘I wouldn’t get too far in any case, and however far I had got, with my bad luck, the earth would be the first thing I saw,’ or so he figured) and that his discomfort at the slightest movement was rather greater than it appeared. He had no real desire to participate in dubious ventures, nor did the thought of casual experiments in some unfamiliar situation appeal to him, since—and he never passed up the chance to draw a sharp distinction between ‘the enchantment of illusion and the misery of its fruitless pursuit’—he knew well enough that, faced with the prospect of such a dizzying journey, all he could count on would be ‘the unique quality of his own immobility’. After fifty hard years of suffering, of trying and failing to cross the swamp that con
stituted the town of his birth with its marsh-like foulness and suffocating stupidity, he had found a refuge from it. That intoxicating—ah, how brief—moment of daydreaming had proved utterly ineffective against it and he could hardly deny that even a short walk through its mire was beyond his powers. Not that he did deny it, of course, that was why he hadn’t left his house in years, for he felt that even a chance meeting with another citizen, the passing of a few words at the street corner he had at last carelessly ventured out to, might cancel out all the progress he had made in his retirement. Because he wanted to forget everything he had had to suffer during the decades of his so-called directorship of the academy of music: those grinding attacks of idiocy, the blank ignorant look in people’s eyes, the utter lack of burgeoning intelligence in the young, the rotten smell of spiritual dullness and the oppressive power of pettiness, smugness and low expectation under the weight of which he himself had almost collapsed. He wanted to forget the urchins whose eyes unmistakably glittered with a desire to set about that hated piano with an axe; the Grand Symphony Orchestra he was obliged to assemble from the ranks of assorted drunken tutors and misty-eyed music lovers; the thunderous applause with which the unsuspecting but enthusiastic public, month after month, rewarded this scandalous, unimaginably awful band of incompetents whose slender talents were not fit to grace a village wedding; the endless struggle educating them to music and his vain plea that they should play more than one blessed piece all the time—all those ‘continual trials’ of his ‘monumental patience’. There were many people he wanted to wipe from his memory: Wallner, the humpbacked tailor; Lehel, the headmaster of the grammar school, whose stupidity was unsurpassed; Nadabán, the local poet; Mahovenyecz, the obsessive chess-player, employee of the water-tower; Mrs Plauf and both her husbands; Dr Provaznyik, who, with his doctor’s diploma, eventually succeeded in easing everyone’s path into the grave; they all deserved it, from the constantly crocheting Mrs Nuszbeck to the hopelessly mad chief of police, from the chairman of the local council with his eye for prepubescent girls to the very last roadsweeper, in short ‘the whole breeding ground of dark stupidity’ was to be annihilated in one fell swoop and for ever. Of course, the person he most devoutly wished to remain ignorant of was Mrs Eszter, his wife, that dangerous prehistoric beast from whom he, ‘by the grace of God’, had separated years ago, who reminded him of nothing so much as one of those merciless medieval mercenaries, with whom he had tied that infernal comedy of a marriage thanks to an unforgivable moment of youthful carelessness, and who, in her uniquely dismal and alarming essence, summed up all that ‘multifarious spectacle of disillusionment’ the society of the town, in his view, somehow succeeded in representing. Even before the beginning when, glancing up from his score, the fact of his being a husband dawned on him and he examined his spouse rather more thoroughly, he was presented with the insoluble problem of how to avoid calling his over-ripe fiancée by her astonishing Christian name (‘How can I call her Tünde, after a fairy in a poem,’ he had pondered, ‘when she looks like a sack of old potatoes!’) and though, after a while, this problem seemed relatively unimportant, he never dared utter his alternatives to it aloud. For ‘the deadly appearance’ of his marital partner, which chimed in so perfectly with the quality of the awful choir he was doomed to conduct, was as nothing to the revelation of his better half’s inner character which pointed unmistakably to something military and martinet-like, that recognized one beat and one beat only, that of the forced march, and only one melody, that of the call to arms. And since he was unable to keep step, the martial trumpet sound of her voice made him shudder, and turned his marriage into what was, in his view, a satanic cell, a trap from which it was not only impossible to escape but which made the mere thought of escape appear to lie beyond him. Instead of ‘the basic life-energy and the poor-man’s implacable need for moral certainty’ he had unconsciously expected, shamefully in retrospect, at the time of their engagement, he found himself facing something that, without exaggeration, amounted to an ‘imbecility’ that intensified from sickness to overweening ambition and a kind of ‘vulgar arithmetic’ shot through with the crude spirit of the barracks, a roughness, an insensitivity, an inferno of such deeply destructive hate and crass boorishness, that over the decades it utterly incapacitated him. He became incapacitated and defenceless because he could neither bear her nor rid himself of her (the merest mention of divorce would loose a merciless torrent of abuse on his head …), nevertheless he suffered life under a single roof with her for close on thirty years, until one day, after thirty nightmare years, his life had reached a low point ‘from which there was no descent’. He was sitting by the window of the director’s office in the converted chapel which was the music academy, pondering the significance of some unsettling comments made by Frachberger, the blind piano tuner, whom he had just let out through the door. He looked out at the pale sunset, noted people laden down with nylon bags making their way home down the dark cold streets, and the thought flashed by him that, slowly, he too should start home, when a wholly unexpected and utterly unfamiliar sense of choking seized him. He wanted to stand up, get a glass of water perhaps, but his limbs refused to move, and he understood at that moment that it was not a passing fit of airlessness but a permanent fatigue, the disgust, bitterness and immeasurable misery of over fifty years of ‘being exhausted by such sunsets and such journeys home’ that had him in its grip. By the time he arrived at the house in the avenue and shut the door behind him, he had realized he could stand it no longer and decided to lie down; he would lie down and never get up again so that he would never lose another minute, because he knew the moment he lay down in his bed that night ‘the great burden of human decline into madness, imbecility, dullness, thick-headedness, gracelessness, tastelessness, crudity, infantilism, ignorance and general stupidity’ was not something that could be slept off even in fifty more years. Throwing all his previous caution aside, he invited Mrs Eszter to leave the house at her earliest convenience and informed his office that owing to his state of physical decline he was relinquishing all his privileges and obligations forthwith; as a result of which, to his greatest astonishment, his wife disappeared just like that, as in any fairy tale, and the formal decision concerning his pension arrived a few weeks later by special post, wishing him well for his ‘outstanding work in musical research’, bearing an indecipherable scrawl for a signature, signifying that from that day forth, by the ineffable grace of fortune, he should remain undisturbed and live only for that which he now considered to have been his mission in the first place, that is to recline on his bed and banish boredom by composing, day and night, sentences like variations ‘on the same bitter theme’. Who or what he should thank for the strikingly exceptional behaviour of the institution or of his wife he had no idea, especially once the first waves of relief had washed over him, though the general conviction that his unexpected retirement was due only to the fact that his many years of research into ‘the world of sound’ had reached a last and decisive turning point was clearly based on a misapprehension, a mistaken hypothesis that was not entirely unfounded, although—in his case—it was incorrect to speak of musical research but rather of a moment of anti-musical enlightenment, something that has been glossed over for centuries, a ‘decisive revelation’ that, for him, amounted to a particularly distressing scandal. On that fateful day he was doing his customary evening round of the buildings so as to check that no one remained inside before it was locked up, and finding himself in the main hall of the academy, he saw Frachberger—clearly forgotten by the others—and as so often before, when he had come upon the old man engaged on his monthly work of tuning the pianos, he couldn’t help but hear him muttering to himself. On hearing that muttering Eszter would normally sneak out of the room without signalling his presence, a gesture born of sensitivity (or possibly distaste), and get someone else to hurry the old man up, but that afternoon he found no one, not even a cleaner, in the building, so it was left to him personally to rouse him f
rom his meditations. Tuning fork in hand, presumably so he should distinguish more clearly between those wavering As and Es, this master craftsman lay, as was his wont, athwart the instrument, incapable of making the slightest movement without an accompanying noise, merrily conducting a one-sided conversation. At first his utterances seemed nothing but idle chatter, and as far as Frachberger himself was concerned it was indeed no more than that, but when, having found an as yet untuned chord, he cried out a second time (‘How did this sweet little fifth get here? Terribly sorry, my dear, but I shall have to take you down a peg or two …’), Eszter was all attention. Ever since he was young he had lived with the unshakeable conviction that music, which for him consisted of the omnipotent magic of harmony and echo, provided humanity’s only sure stay against the filth and squalor of the surrounding world, music being as close an approximation to perfection as could be imagined, and the stench of cheap perfume in the stuffy hall together with Frachberger’s senile croakings represented a crude violation of such transparent ideality. This Frachberger creature was the last straw that late afternoon: a fury seized Eszter and, while still in its first fit, quite against character, he frog-marched the confused ancient out of the hall, and rather than pressing the white stick into his hand, practically threw it after him. His words though were not so easily disposed of: like siren voices, they wailed inside him, torturing him, and, perhaps already suspecting where this innocent-sounding chatter would soon lead, he couldn’t put them out of his mind. Naturally enough, he recalled a sentence from his own academic training, to the effect that ‘European instruments of the last two or three hundred years have been tuned to what is known as “well-tempered” pitch’, and though at that time he had seen no particular signficance in the fact, it having been no concern of his what precisely lay beneath this simple statement, the once cheery sound of Frachberger’s solitary mumbling now suggested that it referred to some sort of mystery, a kind of vague burden that had to be shifted before it crushed his desperate belief in the perfection of musical utterance, and in the weeks following his retirement, as soon as he had survived the most dangerous vortices of his own fatigue, he set about the grinding labour of immersing himself in the subject that seemed to strike most viciously at his person. And it quickly became apparent that his immersion in the subject entailed engagement in a painful struggle of liberation against the last stubborn fantasies of self-delusion, because, once having worked his way through the dusted shelves full of relevant books in the hall, he had also worked out of his system that last illusion concerning the nature of ‘musical resistance’ with which he had tried to shore up his beleaguered values, and just as Frachberger ‘took a pure fifth down a peg or two’, so he too toned down the heroic mirage of his ideas until only those terminally darkening skies were left. Peeling away the inessential, or rather evoking the essential underlying concepts, he attempted, above all, to differentiate between musical and non-musical sound, positing that the former was distinguished by certain symmetries arising from harmonics inherent in its basic physical nature, that its characteristic quality lay in the fact that single vibrations comprised a whole series of so-called periodic waves which could be expressed in terms of relations between whole numbers; then went on to examine the essential conditions under which two sounds existed in harmonious relationship with each other, and established that ‘pleasure’, or the musical equivalent of such a sensation, was occasioned when the two above-mentioned sounds or tones produced the maximum number of harmonics and when the fewest of these were within critical proximity of each other; all this so he should be able, without the least tinge of doubt, to identify the concept of musical order and the ever more lamentable stations of its history, whose decisive conclusion he had almost reached. Because of his indifferent state of mind, whenever he learned anything new he tended to forget specific details and was obliged to refresh his memory and enlarge upon it, so it wasn’t surprising that during those feverish weeks his room was buried under a vast mountain of note-paper listing such a great mass of functions, calculations, decimal points, fractions, frequencies and harmonic indices that you could hardly walk for them. He had to understand Pythagoras and his mathematical daemon, how the Greek master, surrounded by his admiring students, established a musical system that, in its own terms, was wholly mesmeric, all through calculations based on the length of a stopped string, and he absolutely had to admire the brilliant insight of Aristoxenus, who trusted to the genuine musicianship and instinctive inventiveness of the ancient player and relied entirely on the ear, and, because he clearly heard the universal relationship betwen pure tones, believed the best course he could take was to tune the harmonics of his instrument to the famous Olympian tetrachord; in other words he had to acknowledge and marvel at the fact that ‘the philosopher most concerned with the underlying unity of the cosmos and harmonic expression’ had, from wholly distinct temperamental premises, arrived at surprisingly similar conclusions. At the same time he was forced to acknowledge that what followed, to wit the sad history of the so-called development of the science of music, demonstrated the limits of natural tuning, and to observe that the problematic process of pitching an instrument, which, owing to difficulties of modulation, firmly excluded the use of the higher registers, rendered it ever more insufferable, in other words he was forced to watch events taking their fatal course, as the essential question—the meaning and value of pitch—was gradually, step by step, forgotten. The way led through Master Salinas of Salamanca, the Chinese master Tsai-Yun, through Stevinen, Praetorius and Mersenne, to the organ-master of Halberstadt, and while this last managed to resolve this issue once and for all to his own satisfaction in his Von musikalischen Temperatur of 1691, the issue remained what it was, a complex problem of tuning, or how one might—after all—employ all seven tones of the European scale in as free a manner as possible while using instruments tuned to a fixed pitch. Reserving to himself the right to change his mind, Werckmeister cut the Gordian knot with a cavalier swish of his sword and, maintaining only the precise intervals between octaves, divided the universum of the twelve half-tones—what was the music of the spheres to him!—into twelve simple and equal parts, so that henceforth, after easily overcoming the feeble resistance of those with a vague hankering after pure tonalities and much to the understandable delight of composers, the position was established. He established this infuriating and shameful position, a position that Eszter historically associated with the most wonderful harmonies and most sublime mutual vibrations, a position in which every note of every masterpiece had, over several centuries, contrived to suggest some great platonic realm, and Eszter was shocked to find that he had been merely dallying in the noxious marshes of its simplicity, a simplicity that had in fact turned out to be ‘false to the core’. Experts flocked to praise Master Andreas’s extraordinary ingenuity though, truth to tell, he was not so much an innovator as an exploiter of predecessors, and they discussed the issue of equal tempering as if this cheat, this fraud, were the most obvious thing in the world; not only that but in their attempts to uncover the true significance of the phenomenon, those elected to enquire into the matter proved even more ingenious than the late Werckmeister himself. Sometimes they discoursed on how, following the genesis and spread of the theory of tonal equidistance, composers unfortunate enough to have been thus far immured within a prison of nine usable tones could now boldly venture into as yet unknown and unexplored territories; at other times on the fact that what they now referred to, in ironic inverted commas, as ‘natural’ tuning, constituted a serious problem of tonality that must be confronted, at which point they usually digressed to the issue of sensibility, for who would willingly forgo the unsurpassable oeuvre of ‘a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms’ simply because the performance of their works of genius entailed some teensy-weensy departure from absolute purity of pitch. ‘We must transcend petty detail,’ they all agreed, and while there were one or two uncertain ivory-tower dwellers who, in the name of appeasement, dared t
o talk of compromise, the great majority adopted a superior smile and slipped the term into inverted commas, nuzzling up to their readers and whispering to them in confidential tones that pure tuning was indeed a mirage and that there was no such thing as pure tone, and even if there were, what would be the point, since everything was going so swimmingly in any case … At this point Eszter gathered these evidences of human failings, these masterworks of acoustics together, and consigned them to the litter basket, thereby, unbeknown to him, causing great joy to Mrs Harrer, not to mention the nearby second-hand book dealer, and furthermore, so that this personal gesture should serve as the public declaration of the end of his painstaking studies, he felt it was time to draw the appropriate conclusions. He did not doubt for a moment that he was dealing not merely with technical matters but with issues of ‘serious philosophical import’, but it was only as he pondered more deeply that he realized that in progressing from ‘Frachberger’s tiny downward adjustment of the pure fifth’ through his passionate researches into tonality he had arrived at an unavoidable crisis of faith where he had to ask himself whether that system of harmony to which all works of genius with their clear and absolute authority referred and on which he, who could certainly not be accused of harbouring illusions, had based his hitherto unshaken convictions, existed at all. Later, once the first and undoubtedly most bitter waves of emotion had passed and his passions had cooled somewhat, he could confront whatever ‘lay in his capacity to understand’, and once he accepted this state of affairs he felt a certain lightness of spirit for having seen clearly and precisely what had happened. The world, as Eszter established, consisted merely of ‘an indifferent power which offered disappointment at every turn’; its various concerns were incompatible and it was too full of the noises of banging, screeching and crowing, noises that were simply the discordant and refracted sounds of struggle, and that this was all there was to the world if we but realized it. But his ‘fellow human beings’, who also happened to find themselves in this draughty uninsulated barracks and could on no account bear their exclusion from some notion of a distant state of sweetness and light, were condemned to burn for ever in a fever of anticipation, waiting for something they couldn’t even begin to define, hoping for it despite the fact that all the available evidence, which every day continued to accumulate, pointed against its very existence, thereby demonstrating the utter pointlessness of their waiting. Faith, thought Eszter, recognizing his own stupidity, is not a matter of believing something, but believing that somehow things could be different; in the same way, music was not the articulation of some better part of ourselves, or a reference to some notion of a better world, but a disguising of the fact of our irredeemable selves and the sorry state of the world, but no, not merely a disguising but a complete, twisted denial of such facts: it was a cure that did not work, a barbiturate that functioned as an opiate. There were ages more fortunate than ours, or so he pondered at that time; one had only to think of the age of Pythagoras and Aristoxenus, when ‘our fellow human beings’ were not only untroubled by doubt but felt no urge to depart from the assurance of their innocent childlike ways because they knew that heavenly harmonies were the province of heaven and were content that the music they contrived on their purely tuned instruments should afford them a glimpse into the vastness of interstellar space. Later though, after the so-called liberation from ordered cosmology, all this counted for less than nothing, since the confused, supercilious band who had opted for sheer chaos wanted none of it, insisting instead on the complete realization of what was only a fragile dream, which of course crumbled the moment it was touched, leaving them to cobble together what they could, a task they entrusted to people such as Salinas and Werckmeister, who dedicated their days and nights to turning falsehood into truth and succeeded so brilliantly that a grateful public could only sit back, examine itself with satisfaction and wink: perfect, just the job. Just the job, Eszter said to himself, and his first thought was whether he should chop up his old piano or simply toss it out of the house, but he soon realized that this was the least attractive way of relieving himself of the shameful memory of his credulousness, so, after briefly reconsidering the situation, he decided to leave the Steinway where it was and to seek instead some more appropriate mode of self-chastisement. Equipped with a tuning socket and a sensitive frequency meter (a hard thing to get in ‘the current commercial climate’), he began to spend ever more time at his ramshackle instrument, and because he believed that readiness was all and did nothing else, by the time he finished his task he was convinced that what he would hear could not possibly surprise him. This was a period of revisionist tuning or what he chose to call his ‘careful adjustments to the Werckmeister oeuvre’, which were, in effect, adjustments in his own sensibility, and while the former project was an unqualified success the latter was a more complex matter and he didn’t feel at all certain about it. Because, when the great day arrived that he could finally seat himself at the retuned piano and devote himself, as he had intended, to playing but one suite of music for the rest of his life (the most brilliant pearls of the higher catalogue numbers in the Wohltemperierte Klavier which were perfectly suited to his purpose), the very first piece he selected, the prelude in C Major, instead of supplying some expected ‘tremulous rainbow’ effect, fell upon his ears with such an unbearably grating din he was forced to admit that nothing could have prepared him for it. As to the famous Prelude in E-flat Minor, the sound it made on this divinely tuned instrument reminded him of nothing so much as the scene at a village wedding, where guests heaved and retched and slipped off their chairs growing ever more drunk, and the fat, squint-eyed, heavily powdered bride, more drunk than the rest, emerged from one of the back rooms dreaming of the future … To ease his suffering he attempted to play the Prelude in F-sharp Major, the one in the second book, that referred to elements of the French overture, but it sounded as dreadful as every other piece he started. Up till now he had devoted all his time to ‘universal retuning’; the time thenceforth was to be one of long and painful adjustment, a process that involved drawing deeply on his inner resources, a straining of every nerve and sinew, and when, after months of effort, he succeeded, not so much in liking but in simply bearing the ear-splitting racket, he decided to reduce his twice-two-hours-per-day to a bare sixty minutes of torture. Nor did he neglect that hour, not even after Valuska became a regular visitor; indeed, as soon as his young friend had outgrown the role of meal-provider and become his general factotum and confidant, he began to share the painful secret of his deep disillusion and daily self-punishment with him. He explained the mechanics of the scale, drawing Valuska’s attention to the fact that there was nothing mechanical about it, since the seven, apparently fixed, consecutive notes were not merely equal sevenths of a unitary octave, but seven distinct qualities, like seven stars in a constellation; he enlightened him about the limits of ‘insight’, and how a melody—precisely because of the divergency of the seven qualities—could not be played beginning at any point of the scale, since a scale was ‘not a regular series of temple steps we can run up and down on as we please, enjoying congress with the gods’; he introduced him to ‘the sorry rank of brilliant experts’, from the blind man of Burgos to the Flemish mathematician, and he lost no opportunity of treating him—by way of example, so he should know how that wonderful piece sounded when ‘performed on this most celestial of instruments’—to performances of Johann Sebastian. Over several years, day after day, every afternoon, having pushed his dinner aside after a few uninviting spoonfuls, he had shared with Valuska these regular acts of penance for his earlier foolhardiness and, now, hoping to delay the moment when he’d have to discover the secret of the screwed-up note and the nervously clutched case, he trusted to this routine once more, firmly determined to continue it by playing, ‘for his edification’, something from Johann Sebastian; but his scheme was to be frustrated either because he had left too long a gap after his last memorable remark or because Valuska had drawn on extra
reserves of courage; in any case, what matters is that his bright-eyed guest got the first word in, and, however hesitantly the subsequent words followed, beginning with Valuska’s own role in the matter of the suitcase, Eszter immediately realized that his fears had not been entirely insubstantial. Not at all insubstantial—for though the message and the identity of the messenger caught him off guard … he had always known that, having left the house, his wife would not only not forgive him for booting her out but would devise some scheme to get back at him, that the cool way he told her to go called for revenge. It did not matter that the day of her departure appeared so distant as to be positively antediluvian, that many years had passed since then; not for a moment did he console himself with the thought that Mrs Eszter would never again disturb him, for though he had deliberately ‘wiped out the memory’ of the formal divorce proceedings and for all the fact that this insulated him to some degree, the theatrical business of the suitcase full of laundry forced him to admit that ‘the slut had by no means given the matter up’. He had to endure this ridiculous comedy in which week after week his gargantuan spouse, while pretending that her husband knew nothing of this secret arrangement, had, ever since his retirement, continued to do his washing and sent it back via the gullible Valuska, who had to pretend it had come from the laundry. ‘That is about the only thing she is good for, dealing with dirty washing,’ was Eszter’s opinion at the time, but now he saw what a terrible price he had to pay for his earlier carelessness, for he quickly discovered her clothes at the bottom of the suitcases and knew it was her surprisingly crude way of announcing that she would be back in the house ‘this very afternoon’. There was nothing here to suggest that the time for revenge had actually come, but it was enough to leave Eszter in a state of confusion until Valuska (who, being terrified of her, never ceased praising her) stuttered something that made it plain: Mrs Eszter’s uniquely wicked ‘scheme’ concerned the near future rather than the present. She did not intend moving in immediately, it was simply a way of hinting that she could do so at any time, a form of blackmail; all she was asking, it appeared from the note, was that he should take his place at the head of some campaign for moral rearmament, which had, so to speak, ‘chosen him as leader’. She was sending a list, Valuska added enthusiastically, mumbling as usual, a list of all the local citizens’ names who should be won round to the cause, so he must start immediately—it was a race against time—doing the rounds of the houses, not tomorrow but today, immediately, now, for every minute was precious—and so that he should be in no doubt what was waiting for him if he failed to act, to end with she hinted at ‘an evening over supper together …’ Rather than say anything while his friend was still in full flow, he didn’t open his mouth even after Valuska—almost certainly cowed by the low, scheming hag—had ceased praising her ‘loyalty and unprecedented tenderness’, but lay silently among the soft cushions of the once ornamental chaise-longue, his eyes following the sparks as they leapt from the fireplace. Should he resist? Should he tear the slip of paper up? Should he attack her with an axe, much as sensitive freshmen might attack a piano at the unguarded academy, if she dared approach the house ‘sometime in the evening’? No, Eszter said to himself, there was nothing he could do in the face of such wile and power, so he pushed back the covers and sat with bent back on the edge of the bed before slowly divesting himself of his maroon dressing gown. He told his friend, who was inexpressibly relieved to hear it, that he was obliged, however briefly, to suspend ‘the inestimable pleasures of soothing oblivion’ because ‘testes vis maior’ etc., a decision that was made quickly, not so much because he was frightened out of his wits, but because he immediately perceived that, being as unwilling as he was to engage in warfare and wishing to avoid the worst, it was the only position he could adopt; he had, in effect, to yield to blackmail without the least struggle and not to think about it any longer, though this did not apply to the thought of having to move out; indeed, after having entrusted Valuska with the task of ‘disinfecting’ the place by depositing the suitcase—temporarily—at the furthermost point of the house (‘The suitcase, at least, can be moved, if not the sense of her presence …’), he hesitated in front of the wardrobe in some confusion. It wasn’t that he doubted his judgement, he simply didn’t know where to begin and what to do next, and like someone who has for a minute forgotten one part of a sequence of movements, he stood there, staring at the wardrobe door, opening and shutting it again. He opened it and shut it, then returned to his bed so that he might set out for the wardrobe again, and since, at this point, the hopelessness of his situation dawned on him, he tried to concentrate on one thing at a time and decide whether he should choose his dull sky-grey suit or the black one, which was more fitted to such a funereal occasion. He vacillated between the two, choosing now this, now that, but failed to reach any decision about his shirt or tie or shoes or even his hat, and if Valuska hadn’t suddenly begun to rattle about with the lunch-box in the kitchen and startled him with the noise, he would probably have remained in this state of indecision well into the evening and not have realized it was neither the grey nor the black he wanted but a third option, something that might offer him protection out there, a suit of armour ideally. Ideally, he would have preferred to choose not between jackets, waistcoats and overcoats but between helmets, breastplates and greaves, for he was all too aware that the ridiculous humiliation entailed in what he was forced to do—Mrs Eszter turning him into the equivalent of a street cleaner—would be as nothing compared to the potentially fatal real difficulties he would soon encounter; after all, it was about two months since he had last attempted a short walk down to the nearest corner. These difficulties included the moment he first made contact with pavement and air, with all those distances impossible to judge, with the perils he might have to face once he entered on the symbolic dialogue between ‘roof ridges willing themselves to collapse and the suffocating sweetness of starched net curtains’, not to mention what one might call the usual ‘chances one takes in the street’ (complication upon complication!), such as meeting the first, the second, then all the other citizens who were bound to come his way. He had to stand there, steady as a rock, holding his peace, while they mercilessly gave vent to their joy at seeing him again; he had to hold firm while miscellaneous people indulged their legally sanctified lack of restraint and laid the full complement of their psychological problems at his feet, and, worst of all—and here he grew melancholy at the thought—he must remain deaf and blind to all their stifling imbecility in case he should be lured into the truly sickening trap of showing sympathy or commit himself to an act of participation that might prove irreversible, predicaments he had avoided by withdrawing from society and ‘enjoying the well-earned blessings of angelic indifference’. Trusting that his friend-in-need would relieve him of some aspects of his task, he did not concern himself with the manner in which he might go about them: it was of no consequence to him whether he finished up organizing a sewing circle, winning a pot-plant competition or leading this clearly obsessed movement dedicated to sweeping changes, and since he devoted all his energy to resisting such grotesque visions, having finished dressing and taking a last look in the mirror at his impeccable outfit (grey, as it happened), he briefly entertained the faint likelihood of returning from the horrible prospect of his walk unscathed, when his aperçus about the sorry state of the world and his general thoughts, which were far harder to put into words, concerning as they did such subjects as the sparks emitted by the fire in the fireplace and the evanescence of their ‘evil if enigmatic significance’, might be continued precisely where—owing to Mrs Eszter’s foreseeable yet surprising demands—they had so regrettably left off. This was a faint possibility, he thought, but it would call for tremendous exertions in the face of potentially fatal difficulties; and as he passed the ever thinner double row of books in the hall with Valuska in his wake (Valuska was cheerfully dangling the lunch-box by now), and crossed the twilit threshold of the building to rea
ch the street outside, the air he breathed seemed sharp as poison and he grew so dizzy that instead of worrying about ‘being overwhelmed by the tide of middle-class manners’ what really concerned him was whether his legs would support him in the confused and fluid space, and whether it wouldn’t be wiser to consider retreating there and then, ‘before,’ he added as if answering another question, ‘the lungs, the heart, the sinews and muscles could answer for themselves with a resounding no’. It was tempting to go home, lock himself away in the drawing room and insulate himself with cushions and rugs in pleasant warmth, but he couldn’t seriously consider it, since he knew what to expect if he ‘disobeyed orders’: it was equally tempting to bash the monster’s head in. He sought support from his walking stick and his suddenly anxious friend leapt to his assistance (‘There’s nothing wrong, is there, Mr Eszter, sir?’), and eventually he regained his balance and dismissed all thought of resistance from his mind, and concentrated on accepting the dizzy state of the world that was spinning round him as a perfectly natural state of affairs, at which point he took a tight grip of Valuska’s arm and continued on his way. He continued on his way, having decided that Valuska, his guardian angel—either because he was scared of the woman or because he was overjoyed at being able to show him his old haunts—was prepared to haul him through the streets even in his half-dead state, and so, muttering something to allay his fears (‘No, it’s nothing … nothing really’), he kept the true details of his disorientating dizziness and progressive weakening to himself; and while the latter, satisfied that there was nothing to hinder their walk, embarked on an enthusiastic monologue about the dawn birth of that mush of icy mist rolling about them, under whose riveting spell he seemed to have fallen as if for the first time, Eszter, quite beyond the hopes of a few moments ago and truly deaf and blind by now, gave all his attention to keeping his balance, placing one foot in front of another, so that they might at least reach a resting place at the nearest corner. He felt as if he had developed cataracts on both his eyes and was swimming through some foggy void: his ears were ringing, his legs shaking and a hot flush ran through his entire body. ‘I might faint …’ he thought, and rather than fearing such a spectacular loss of consciousness, he actually desired it, for it dawned on him that if he were to collapse in the street, surrounded by a huddle of frightened bystanders, and be carried home on a stretcher, Mrs Eszter’s plan might be ruined and he could escape from the trap by the simplest means possible. Ten more steps, he calculated, might be enough for this fortunate turn of events to take place; to realize that no such turn might be expected took him no more than five. They were passing the higher numbers in Eighteen Forty-Eight Street when, instead of collapsing, he suddenly began to feel better: his legs no longer shook, the ringing in his ears ceased, and, to his greatest annoyance, even the sense of dizziness left him; in other words he had no excuse left for cutting short his walk. He stopped to find he could hear and see once more, and once he saw he was forced to look around and take account of the fact that something had certainly changed since his last excursion into ‘this hopeless bog of a town’. He couldn’t pin down what precisely it was, not at any rate in those first few moments of flickering confusion, but though he couldn’t isolate the phenomenon he had nevertheless to acknowledge that Mrs Harrer’s chattering had not been entirely beside the point. Not entirely beside the point, that was true, but a voice inside him whispered that Mrs Harrer hadn’t quite got the essence of the thing, for, by the time they had taken a breather at the corner of the avenue and the main trunk road, and he had taken ‘proper stock of the matter’, it became apparent to him that, contrary to the opinion of his loyal cleaner, his ‘beloved birthplace’ did not have the look of a town just waiting for the end of the world but rather of one that had survived it. What surprised him was that instead of the usual look of aimless idiocy on the faces of passers-by—an expression of endless patience also adopted by those who peeked from windows in anxious expectation of some great event, in other words ‘the usual dungheap smell of spiritual lethargy’—Wenckheim Avenue and the surrounding streets wore a hitherto unrecognized air of desolation and a look of speechless and arid neglect had replaced the ‘monstrous vacancy’ he was used to. It was strange that while the generally deserted neighbourhood suggested the aftermath of some cataclysmic event, all the incidentals and accidentals of life—contrary to what you would expect in the case of imminent plague or radiation sickness, when everyone would flee in panic—were still in place, looking as permanent as ever. All this was strange and surprising, but what he found most shocking—once he realized it—was that the answer to this conundrum that even a blind man could not help but be aware of and which he himself instinctively and immediately recognized, an instinct which told him that he had entered a terrain that had undergone some scandalous transformation, lay out of his reach despite the fact that as each minute passed he grew ever more convinced that there was an answer, but it was in the form of some hidden clue which even if he could spot—and clearly it had to be visible—he would be unable to recognize: it was something in this gradually more focused image—the silence, the desolate mood, the soulless perfection of the deserted streets—a point of rest on which everything else stood. He leaned with half a shoulder against the wall of the gateway that served as their resting place, gazing at the buildings opposite, taking in the enormity of their voids, their windows and lunettes and the patchwork effect they created as they melted into the spaces between joists, then, while Valuska chattered away, he held his hands against the stucco behind his back in case the crumbling condition of the substance between his fingers might tell him what had happened. His gaze took in the storm-lamps and the pillars covered in advertisements; he observed the bare tops of the chestnut trees and let his eyes run down both ends of the main road, seeking an explanation in terms of distance, size or discrepancy in proportions. But he found no answer there, so he tried to locate an axis that might impose some meaning on the town’s ostensible disorder, looking ever further afield in his effort, until he was forced to admit that it was hopeless searching for a clear overview under a dark sky like this that made early afternoon look like dusk. This sky, Eszter decided, this incomprehensible mass, this complex weight that had settled across them, had not changed its character, not in the slightest detail, and since this suggested that to conceive of even the most minor modulation of its surface was an absolute waste of time he determined to abandon the search and stifle his curiosity, putting the failure of his ‘first instinctive reaction’ down to the erratic functioning of an overstretched nervous system. To hell with it, he decided, acknowledging that he could not count on a favourable resolution to the so-far-steady improvement in his generally lamentable condition, and, as if to underline this, had fixed his ostensibly wandering attention on what Valuska’s ringing words declared to be ‘that eternal herald of good tidings’, the indifferent dome of the sky, when, suddenly, like the proverbial absent-minded professor who discovers his lost glasses at the end of his own nose, he realized that he should not be looking up but down at his feet, since what he was looking for was there, there to the extent that he was standing on it. He was standing on it, had been treading its surface all along, and was fated to proceed along it in the immediate future, and as he noted this, he put his belated recognition of it down to the fact that it was all too obvious, too close, and its unsuspected proximity was the problem; it was because he could touch it, indeed walk all over it, that he had ignored it, and he was furthermore convinced that when, in those first few moments, he had sensed that there was something ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘shockingly revolutionary’ about it, he was far from mistaken. It was not the bare fact that was so astonishing, since, by some tacit agreement, the town—its capacity for civic enthusiasm being strictly limited—regarded every piece of common ground as a kind of no man’s land, with the result that for several years now no one had bothered with the so-called ‘issue’ of road maintenance. It wasn’t even the unusual quality
of the tide of the stuff that startled him, but its quantity, which Eszter, unlike the twenty thousand or so pedestrians, including Mrs Harrer, who daily trod the pavements—and had she taken particular notice of it she would certainly not have failed to let him know—considered fantastic beyond his wildest dreams. His ostensible response was a simple, ‘Well, well …’ but he was horrified: it was impossible, you couldn’t throw away, you couldn’t drag here such an enormous volume of it, and, since what he saw far exceeded anything that might have been credibly explained to an individual of normal intelligence, he felt that, taking the scale of this extraordinary and ‘monstrous work of havoc’ into account, he might be justified in risking the opinion that ‘the exclusively human capacity for mind-numbing levels of neglect and indifference was, beyond a doubt, truly limitless’. ‘The amount of it! The sheer amount of it!’ He shook his head and, dropping any pretence of listening to Valuska’s interminable discourse, attempted to take in the extent of this monstrosity, this all-pervading deluge, able at last, for the first time, now, at roughly three o’clock in the afternoon, to give a name to that which had so strangely disorientated him. Rubbish. Everywhere he looked the roads and pavements were covered with a seamless, chinkless armour of detritus and this supernaturally glimmering river of waste, trodden into pulp and frozen into a solid mass by the piercing cold, wound away into the distant twilight greyness. Apple cores, bits of old boots, watch-straps, overcoat buttons, rusted keys, everything, he coolly noted, that man may leave his mark by, was here, though it wasn’t so much this ‘icy museum of pointless existence’ that astonished him (for there was nothing remotely new about the particular range of exhibits), but the way this slippery mass snaking between the houses, like a pale reflection of the sky, illuminated everything with its unearthly, dull, silvery phosphorescence. The awareness of where he was exercised an increasingly sobering effect on him—he had by no means lost his capacity for calm appraisal—and as he continued to appraise, as if from a considerable eminence, the monstrous labyrinth of filth, he grew ever more certain that, since his ‘fellow human beings’ had utterly failed to notice this flawless and monumental embodiment of doom, it was pointless talking about a ‘sense of community’. It was, after all, as if the earth had opened up beneath him, revealing what lay underneath the town, or, and he tapped at the pavement with his stick, as if some terrible putrescent marsh had seeped through the thin layer of asphalt to cover everything. A marsh in a bog, thought Eszter, the essential fundamentum of the place, and standing there for a while in vacant contemplation he suddenly had a vision of the houses, trees, lampposts and advertisement hoardings sinking right through it. Could this, he wondered, be a form of the last judgement? No trumpets, no riders of the apocalypse but mankind swallowed without fuss or ceremony by its own rubbish? ‘Not an altogether surprising end,’ thought Eszter, adjusting his scarf, then, having come to this neat full stop and considering his own investigations at an end, prepared to move off. But, understandably enough, he felt rather uncertain about the sheer idea of stepping from the solid concrete of the gateway to the frozen marsh of the pavement for that solid, static, infernal layer of waste in aspic had the knack of appearing both thick and thin, both substantial and brittle at once: like a pond with one day’s covering of ice, it might crack as soon as you put any weight on it. As a concept, it was thick and unbreakable, the top layer of an infinite mass: as substance though it looked wafer thin, a distinctly hazardous surface incapable of sustaining him; and while he stood there, vacillating between the prospects of moving or remaining, the spirit of loathing and resistance rose up in him once again and he decided that ‘owing to unforeseen circumstances’ he would simplify Mrs Eszter’s prescribed modes of procedure and pass the list she had left him to whoever happened to come along: let them arrange the affairs under his name, affairs that, with the town in this condition, he was wholly unfitted to deal with, let them get on with what remained of organizational matters; as for him, he decided, he should make his way home as quickly as his sanity, the state of his health and the petrified lava of lunar rubbish allowed. Unfortunately there was precious little chance of meeting anyone, the only visible life-form along Béla Wenckheim Avenue being a hardier species of cat, great softly padding packs of them, guarding, in their indolent way, the frozen residue of objects which still held significance for them, but from which, as far as everyone else was concerned, the weight of meaning had been lifted like some unspecified burden. They were overweight creatures, grown visibly feral, born out of a long dream, who, in these favourable circumstances, were clearly reverting to their ancient predatory instincts, witnesses, tsars of a long-expected dark age that seemed as if it would go on for ever, the new lords of a town where ‘as far as he saw, the signs of a progressive and general decadence were all too evident’. No one could doubt that these cats were afraid of nothing, and, right on cue, as if to prove it, an individual beast in one of the packs, one that, judging by the half-rat between its jaws, had clearly not gone hungry, having recognized potential prey in the figures of two members of the former master race in the gateway, was approaching them with an air of insolent audacity. Eszter did not accord any special significance to the cats, but, once he noticed them, made a shooing movement with his hand which was intended to frighten them off, a gesture wasted on the uninhibited rabble that had apparently stuffed itself to the point of nausea; and, since the deference once owing to his species was no longer forthcoming at a mere gesture, its only effect being a cautious minor retreat on the part of the pack, it seemed he would have to resign himself to their company; and so it proved, for, having resolved to move off (and thereby put an end to all that vacillation) and set out in the direction of the cinema and the Komló Hotel, they found that the cats, instead of leaving them alone, ‘as if recognizing, in their instinctive animal way, the change in their relative status’, continued to follow them a good part of the way, at least as far as the hotel where Valuska picked up Eszter’s dinner and stowed it in his lunch-box, at which point, like detectives grown tired of tailing a suspect, they simply gave up and dispersed to forage among the most recent-looking of the piles of rubbish, resorting to their keen primitive sense of smell as they searched for scraps of meat, chicken bones or, indeed, live rats. The whole place looked as if an unruly carnival had not long ago passed that way: dangerous piles of broken glass and shards of bottles of cheap spirits lay before the deserted hotel entrance while, on the other side of the street, a gutted and vandalized bus, which seemed to have collapsed in mid-genuflection about its broken axle, stood with its hood up against Schuster’s haberdashery shop as if someone had given it a vague shove in that direction. Soon enough Valuska rejoined Eszter and they reached the Chez Nous Café, from where, according to Mrs Harrer, the famous poplar tree ought to have been visible (the one which had apparently got so bored with gripping the soil it let go its hold and collapsed, like some harmless giant, across the narrow width of Hétvezér Passage). Eszter, who was undoubtedly still dazed by the general experience of being outside but was thinking only of the rubbish, drew his companion’s attention to it. ‘Tell me, my friend, do you see what I see?’ But it was pointless trying to share his astonishment with him: that was plain the moment he opened his mouth, for, after a moment of confusion (in himself or in the other man?), the merest glance at Valuska’s shining face revealed that, having concluded his account of his dawn reveries, his mind was altogether elsewhere, as indeed it would be, thought Eszter, in one who had spent an eternity wandering the city streets and still did not notice anything unusual in this nightmare landscape—and the beaming expression on the face of his escort on this mournful shuffling walk was perfect demonstration of the fact that he regarded it almost as a kind of negation of the filth underfoot; it was as if the whole occasion were in some way uplifting, and that it was only due to some hallucination, born out of his own weakness and astonishment, that Eszter, having realized his mistake far too late, had stumbled across a ghost town where the ol
d town had been. Ever since they had left the house he had concentrated solely on observing and assessing the situation, had hardly heard what the other man said, and if he had been aware of his presence at all it was merely because their arms were linked; so it was strange that now, suddenly, in understanding everything too late, he saw that there was but one proper target for his attention, that being the figure beside him, the man wearing a cap and a coarse, enormous postman’s cloak, that blissfully meandering conveyor of provisions, Valuska himself. Up to this point—having so far, mistakenly, assumed he was dealing with a doomed but still functioning society—it had not occurred to him that the strictly reliable system of regular lunch-time and early-afternoon ‘angelic visitations’, not to mention his own unalterable daily routine, had, in effect, been organized by Valuska, and that his friend’s strange, yet by now seemingly natural, punctuality might be in some way vulnerable to external circumstances; but now, on this day, a day which might justifiably be regarded as special, here before the Chez Nous Café, for the first time in all their long acquaintanceship, Eszter suddenly became aware of the great risks his companion had been running, albeit unwittingly, and was seized with a terrible anxiety. He saw this ultimate version of the last human environment, and could, at the same moment, for the first time, understand and imagine Valuska’s life, how, without knowing quite where he was or to what threat he might be vulnerable, this innocent, unsuspecting creature, blinded by the starlight of his own internal solar system (‘Like a rare endangered butterfly lost in flight in a burning forest …’), had spent his days and nights roaming through this potentially lethal heap of rubbish, and, having understood this, Eszter could draw but one conclusion, which was that he couldn’t rely on himself alone but required the assistance of his faithful companion, which thought, in turn, led him to decide there and then that, if they ever succeeded in finding their way home again, he would never again let Valuska out of his sight. For decades he had acted in the belief that his intellect and sensibility led him to reject a world whose products were unbearable to either intellect or sensibility, but were always available for criticism by the same, but now, stepping from Hétvezér Passage into the funereal silence of Tanács Street, he was forced to concede that all his clear thinking and stubborn adherence to the principles of so-called ‘sober ratiocination’ counted for nothing, since as long as this town, which he took to be representative of the world, persisted in maintaining its lethal reality, that earthy muddy smell he found such a particularly terrible trial would persist in emanating from it. It was no use struggling; he had to understand that his customary Eszterian mode of wit was of no help to him here, for the phrases he thought of failed abysmally to establish his proud superiority over the world; the meanings of words had faded like the light in a run-down flashlight, the objects words might have referred to had crumbled under the weight of the fifty or so years that had passed and given way to the unlikely trappings of a Grand Guignol stage-set in the face of which every sober word and thought confusingly lost its meaning. With such a world, in which statements employing tropes such as ‘as’ and ‘as if’ had lost their cutting edge; in an empire that was prepared to sweep away, or so he believed, not ignorance or opposition but whatever did not fit there; with such a ‘reality’, as Eszter conceived it with a shudder of disgust and repulsion, he had nothing to do—though at this precise minute it would have been very difficult for him to deny that to enter this labyrinth and then make such mad grandiosely dignified declarations could hardly be regarded as anything but eccentric. However, this did not stop him making them and, on their next stop, at the newsagent’s stall in Tanács Street, the friendly newsvendor misunderstood him and tried to explain, by way of reassurance, that he knew the reason for this ‘strange depopulation’, launching so enthusiastically forth on his explanation that it concentrated Eszter’s mind solely on the task of getting home as soon as his mission had been accomplished, and, should he by good fortune have succeeded in accomplishing that, henceforth staying there. For he had lost all interest in what was happening out here, in what calamity would follow the tide of rubbish, in fact he had lost interest in everything except how someone who had blundered into the arena might seek safer soil ‘before the performance was over’, how he might disappear like ‘a gentle melody in the midst of cacophony’ and be hidden away indoors, secreted where nobody could ever find him; and this thought kept nagging away like some faint persistent recollection that at least one figure representative of him—‘some strangled, orphaned, vaguely poetic sensibility’—had, once upon a time, really, quite physically existed. With half an ear he was listening to Valuska’s rapt account of his experiences of the morning, something about a whale in Kossuth Square that attracted not only the local townsfolk, but (an obvious if forgivable exaggeration) ‘positively hundreds of people from the surrounding countryside’, but, truth to tell, he could cope with only one thought at a time, that being the problem of how long they had to turn the house on the avenue into an impregnable fortress that could withstand whatever chance could throw at it. ‘That’s where everyone is,’ his companion announced, and as they made their way up the main street towards the corner where the Water Board stood (its name had attracted a certain sarcasm in the last few months), he entered ever more feverishly into speculation about how marvellous it would be if, as a fitting climax to their excursion, they could view this once-in-a-lifetime monster together, and indeed Valuska’s description of the circus-owner with his squashed nose and soiled vest, of the hours of waiting by the so-called masses who flooded the market square, the whale’s enormous proportions and all the other fabulous details of the extraordinary creature, far from moderating Eszter’s desire acted rather as coal to the fire, for the whole depressing excursion with its even more important ‘uncanny sense of preparation’ could (and indeed should) scarcely have led to any other climax than this spellbinding monstrosity. If, he thought, and the thought depressed him further, if this monster should actually be in the square, and the enormous crowd and the showman in the vest were not merely a sign of his companion’s desperate attempt to populate the deserted town with the products of his imagination, and the existence of this tremendous spectacle were underwritten by the poster stuck on the walls of the furrier’s shop, a poster on which someone had written with a brush, or rather with a finger dipped in ink, the words: CARNIVAL TONIGHT, then it seemed all the more poignant that the more he looked about him in the surrounding desolation the more everything pointed to the fact that apart from the stray cats they seemed to be the only living creatures about—in so far as, Eszter bitterly observed, such a sweeping generalization as ‘living’ could be made to apply to their own miserable selves. For it was no use denying it, they did look a somewhat strange sight, hanging on to each other as they slowly made their way towards the Water Board offices on the corner in the grinding cold, each step a struggle against the icy wind; more like two blind visitors from an alien planet than like a respectable man with his faithful companion at his side setting out to enthuse the populace about, of all things, a movement for moral rearmament. They had to harmonize two ways of walking, two different speeds, and, indeed, two different kinds of incapacity, for while Eszter’s every step across the suspiciously glimmering surface was taken as if it were his last, each appearing to be a preparation for a gradual but ultimately total cessation of movement, Valuska’s acute desire to increase his own momentum was consistently frustrated, and since Eszter was clearly dependent on him, he was constrained to hide the fact that the body leaning on his left arm was endangering his sense of balance, for while his enthusiasm could in some sense support the spiritual weight of his beloved master, the same was not true of the physical equivalent. One could perhaps sum up the situation by saying that their roles consisted of Valuska pulling and tugging and Eszter acting as an effective brake, or that Valuska was practically running while Eszter was practically standing still, but it would be inappropriate to consider their progress severally, part
ly because the discrepancy between their strides seemed to be resolved in some combined lurch forward, an uncertain, painful-looking progress, and partly because their clumsy clinging interdependence precluded their being individually identified as Eszter on the one hand and Valuska on the other: in effect they appeared to form a single bizarre figure. And so they advanced in curious unitary fashion, or, as Eszter rather sourly thought of it, ‘like an exhausted gnome, something perfectly at home in this infernal nightmare’, a wandering shade, a demon that had lost its way, one side of whose body was condemned to supporting the other, the left leaning on a stick, the right merrily swinging a lunch-box, and, as they went on, passing the tiny lawn in front of the Water Board and the silent offices of the Employment Insurance Bureau, they encountered three other figures standing in the doorway of the stocking factory’s White Collar Club who had just glimpsed them and appeared to be rooted to the spot, waiting for the dreaded hand of fate, in the shape of this monstrous apparition slowly approaching them, to reach them (the two groups could well have regarded each other as ghosts), until there came the moment of recognition. ‘Three of the bravest there,’ Eszter nudged Valuska, who was still wholly absorbed in the story of the whale, indicating the ash-grey huddle on the other side (sparing him the supplementary, ‘seeing there is no one else around’), then reminded himself of what Mrs Eszter wanted done apropos her ‘movement’ and set off across the road, steeling himself to the first disturbing waves of missionary endeavour, trying to formulate phrases that might infuse the three men facing him—however poorly they seemed to be equipped for the great reawakening—with appropriate fervour. ‘Something has to be done!’ he bellowed once the formal courtesies were done with, and when he had succeeded in freeing his hand from theirs, one of them, the hard-of-hearing Mr Mádai, whose habit it was to scream mercilessly into his victims’ ears to establish ‘an exchange of views’, kept agreeing with him, and while the other two also agreed, it seemed they strongly disagreed on the more thorny question of what precisely it was that had to be done. Blithely ignoring the issue of what it was they had to do something about and recognizing Eszter as the immediate master of the situation, Mr Nadabán, the fat butcher, whose position among the notable and influential burghers of the town was underwritten by the quality of his ‘gentle and refined poetry’, announced that he would like to call the assembly’s attention to the need for solidarity; but Mr Volent, the fanatical general engineer of the boot factory, shook his head and counselled common sense as the natural starting point, a point with which Mr Mádai disagreed, for, gesturing for silence, he leaned towards Eszter once again and, practically busting his vocal cords, proclaimed, ‘Vigilance, vigilance at all costs, is my advice!’ Not one of them, of course, left any doubt that the central concepts—‘vigilance’, ‘common sense’ and ‘solidarity’—were merely first steps along a logical course of reasoning and that they could hardly wait to sally forth on the mission implied by these noble values and Eszter—deeply relieved at having stumbled upon at least ‘three representative species of local idiot’ at the entrance of the stocking factory’s White Collar Club—had little difficulty in anticipating what would happen if the diversity between the views of three proponents so clearly quivering with excitement and raring to go ever became apparent, so, taking a calculated risk and wanting as soon as possible to yield place to the retreating figure of Valuska, he tried to bridle their rising passions by asking them what united them in their opinion (‘As I assume from the bitter tone of your reply’) that the end of the world had genuinely arrived. The question evidently surprised them and for a single moment the three faces with their different agitated expressions were almost as one, not one of them having expected Gyorgy Eszter to understand the situation; for how, after all, should someone whose existence already seemed to be commemorated in some as yet unwritten epitaph like: ‘He illuminated our daily life by bringing his extraordinary musical gifts to bear upon it’; someone who was an idol of the educated public, the subject of a panegyric in verse which included the line ‘the alpha and omega of our dull lives’, composed by one of the present company, Mr Nadabán; someone who, by virtue of being a genius, was, like all geniuses, presumed to be absent-minded, and who, furthermore, had chosen to withdraw from the noise and haste of the world; how should he have known anything of the matter? Clearly there were many good reasons for him to be ignorant of the situation and the three of them fully appreciated their remarkable fortune in having been chosen—out of all the population of this great town—to inform him of the ominous changes in the neighbourhood. And they kept cutting across each other in their haste to do so: the shops were sometimes full, sometimes empty; education and bureaucracy had more or less broken down; there were terrible problems in heating one’s home because of the shortage of coal; chemists had run out of medicine; travelling by bus or car was impossible; and this very morning, they desperately complained, the telephones had gone dead. This more or less summed up the situation. And what’s more! Volent added bitterly; and not just that! Nadabán interjected; and to top it all! bawled Mr Mádai, and to top it all, here comes this circus to wreck our last faint hopes of restoring order, a circus featuring some dreadful vast whale we have allowed into town out of the goodness of our hearts, against which now nothing can be done. Especially since the really strange events of last night, Nadabán dropped his voice; something more sinister than anything so far, Mádai nodded; since this extraordinarily evil-looking company, Volent’s brow wrinkled, arrived in Kossuth Square. Completely ignoring Valuska, who stared at them with a mixture of sadness and confusion, they addressed themselves to Eszter, explaining that it was bound to be some criminal conspiracy, though it was hard to see what it meant, what it was aimed at, or even to establish the basic facts. ‘There are at least five hundred of them!’ they claimed, but went on to say that there were really only two people involved in the company; one moment it was the star item itself that was the most frightening (they had seen it!), the next it seemed to be merely a diversion from the rise of some kind of mob that was only waiting for night to fall before attacking the peaceful populace; one moment the whale had nothing to do with it, the next it was the cause of all the trouble, and when, finally, they claimed that the ‘shady band of brigands’ was already engaged in looting and rapine and standing immobile in the square at the same time, Eszter decided he had had enough and raised his hand to signal that he wanted to speak. He was interrupted before he could start by Volent, who declared that people were frightened; we cannot stand by and twiddle our thumbs, Nadabán interjected; not while they are plotting our doom, Mádai added in his characteristic fashion. There are children here, Nadabán wiped away a tear; and weeping mothers, Mádai trumpeted; and the most precious thing of all, hearth and home, the family, Volent added, his voice trembling with emotion, all under a terrible threat … One could imagine where this chorus of lamentation might have led if the chorus were not interrupted; one could only imagine since no one would ever know, for they found themselves so weighed down by the air of general gloom they had temporarily run out of breath. Eszter seized the initiative and, bearing in mind the wretched state of their nerves and the tortured condition of their souls, announced that there was, he was pleased to say, a solution: the situation may yet be turned to advantage and secured by a powerful sense of commitment. Without further ado he presented them with the essential programme of the movement for A TIDY YARD, AN ORDERLY HOUSE, the central concern of which, he explained as he looked away somewhere in the distance above their heads, spoke for itself, and if his friends would allow him he would assume the role of ‘ombudsman-in-chief for waste’ and ‘general inspector of refuse’, adding only that he did not doubt for a second the success of their mutual collaboration nor the effective organizational powers of the three gentlemen before him. It was as much as he could do to wait while Valuska handed over the programme for action and explained it all in the most exhaustive detail, and once his companion had finished, he turned on hi
s heels and, compressing the whole act of farewell into a single wave of the hand, left them to digest the information for themselves. He was certain that the seed of Mrs Eszter’s generative words had fallen on fertile soil and that there was nothing more for him to do but to wipe the events of the last quarter of an hour from his mind as thoroughly as he could, so that when his audience of three recovered from his abrupt departure and broke into a spontaneous ecstasy of passion, crying, ‘We shall overcome! Wonderful idea! Solidarity! Common sense! Vigilance!’ he would no longer hear it, and so, drawing strength from the slender comfort that, having exercised his powers of patience to absolute breaking point, he had at least finally rid himself of the burden of his task, he returned to his incomplete plans and tried to think as carefully as he could through possible courses of action. He was aware that news of ‘the successful completion of his assignment’ had to reach his wife unconditionally and in good time (‘And in a few minutes’ time it will be four o’clock already!’), otherwise her threats would certainly be carried out, so, putting an end to the efforts of Valuska, who, having been confused by the preceding gabble, was trying to prove to him the groundlessness of his fears about the circus, he announced that, ‘conscious of a job well done’, he was off home now, but—and here he gave Valuska a significant look, one, however, that did not reveal the full extent of his plans—he would first ask him that whenever he finished whatever remained to do in Honvéd Passage he should return immediately. Naturally, Valuska protested that he couldn’t leave him alone in such cold weather, not to mention abandoning ‘the idea of seeing the whale’, so Eszter was forced to go into a little more detail, interrupting himself only to reassure Valuska that everything was perfectly all right and that he’d manage (‘Look, my friend,’ he said, ‘I cannot say I like the inexorable grip of frost, nor, on the other hand, that my existence here represents the tragedy of a tropical temperament condemned to spend eternity in the empire of snow, since as you know there is no snow, nor shall there be ever again, so let’s not even discuss it. Have no doubt, however, that I am capable of making my way back home over the little distance that remains unaided, even in this cold weather. And another thing,’ he added, ‘don’t spend too much time in regretting the brief postponement of the climax of our memorable adventure. I would happily have made the acquaintance of the majestic being, but we must give it up for the time being. It is, I find,’ he smiled at Valuska, ‘always pleasant and entertaining to come upon a creature on one of the points of the evolutionary scale at which I, personally, would gladly have stopped, but this walk has exhausted me and my rendezvous with your whale will, I imagine, wait till tomorrow … ’ His voice no longer had the sharpness it once had and he was aware that the intention of being witty was far more evident than the wit itself, but since there was a latent commitment in what he said, Valuska, albeit somewhat unhappily, accepted his proposition; so the rest of their way together Eszter remained undisturbed and free to plan the occasion of their next meeting. He came to the conclusion that thanks to Mrs Harrer’s destructive passion for cleanliness, apart from the barricading of the gates and the boarding up of the windows, there was little else needed to make the house habitable, and relieved by this thought he fell to speculating as to what ‘life à deux might be like’. With great care and precision he defined Valuska’s place in the magnetic swamp of his house in the space beside the drawing room, as close to his own as possible, and imagined ‘peaceful mornings spent together’ and ‘silent evenings full of harmony’. He could see them now, sitting together in deep tranquillity, brewing up coffee in the afternoons and preparing hot dinner at least twice a week; his friend would launch forth on his astronomical reveries and he would pass his usual deprecatory remarks, and in so doing they would forget the rubbish, the fading props of the world, the very world itself … He noticed (and the consciousness naturally somewhat embarrassed him) that having got so far with his plans he had begun to shed a few sentimental tears, so he quickly looked round again and, casting his mind back to his sufferings, concluded that in view of his weakened condition (‘Being an old man, as indeed I am’) such a show of emotion was, for once, quite forgivable. He took the ice-cold lunch-box from Valuska, made him swear that as soon as his business was finished he would come straight over, and, after a few other minor admonitions, somewhere in the region of Hétvezér Passage, watched him disappear from view.
The Melancholy of Resistance Page 6