The Melancholy of Resistance

by Krasznahorkai, László

  ‘It all adds up. You have to get the details right. Focus on the details,’ Eszter determined without any particular feeling of anger, as if distancing himself from his own clumsiness when the hammer hit his hand for the twentieth time while he was putting the final touches to the complex barricade he was erecting at this decisive juncture of his life. Gripping his painfully throbbing finger, he surveyed the chaos of boards and planks that covered the windows and, since there was nothing he could do about his shortcomings regarding this sorry sight, resolved that even if he, through countless decades, had shamefully neglected the art of putting hammer to nail, now that he had practically reached the end of the task he would avoid all such painful experiences henceforth. Having personally collected firewood from the yard on his return home—after a few minutes breather, that is—and piled it up between the bookshelves, he now selected one that would more or less do and, carefully considering the possibility of minor adjustments—a consideration that sprang from the apparent senselessness of being here at all, which in turn was a natural concomitant of the line of thought he had pursued in the gateway some three hours ago, a line that caused him to revise and re-evaluate all his previous opinions on the subject and which he therefore considered to be of almost a ‘revolutionary’ nature—he fitted the plank to the space left at the bottom of the jumble of boards covering the last window, but having raised his hammer and bit his lip, determined to carry the matter through in the distant hope of striking the nail-head perfectly the first time round, he immediately lowered it, perceiving that sheer ferocity of will would not ensure both the proper direction and the power of the blow. ‘The arc to be controlled is the one that determines the relationship between the head of the instrument and the head of the nail …’ he decided, contemplating the problem for a few moments, and while his thoughts slowly returned to the matter of ‘minor adjustments’, using all the power of his injured left hand to thrust the plank up against the window-frame, he blindly swung the hammer with his right. This did not result in any greater damage than had already been inflicted and, what was more, the nail-head sank a little further into the wood, but as to the previously rational-sounding idea of channelling the remnants of his already wandering attention into the genuinely valuable effort of observing the so-called arc, he thought better of it. After all, the hammer in his hand felt increasingly unsteady and the results of such experimentation would become ever more unpredictable, so, after the third effort, he had to admit that the fact that he hadn’t missed the nail in three successive goes, far from being due to his level of concentration, was probably down to sheer luck, or, to employ his own formulation, to a certain ‘benevolent grace’ that offered him ‘a moment of respite’ before he ‘systematically beat his fingers to a pulp’; indeed, it was obvious from his failure so far that concentrating on nothing but the desired path of the instrument was precisely the best way of ensuring that he would get it wrong, since, he added, to control the trajectory of the hammer meant that to embark upon the hitherto undervalued operation so drastically reassessed at that fateful turn in his thinking was, according to his own gift for the mot juste, ‘like daydreaming oneself into a situation that does not yet exist or determining the course of something which has yet to come into being’, thereby repeating the exemplary and patent error that sixty years of idiotic blundering had not prepared him for on the last few yards of his way home … And this was the moment when something whispered to him that he would certainly be doing better to bring greater powers to bear on this issue, greater powers (he said to himself) and never guessing that this distancing of himself from the minor dilemma that had absorbed his entire being was actually bringing him closer to it, the utter senselessness of his presence in this place at this time not having excluded the exercise of practical thought, his mind began to focus once more on what lay nearer to hand. It was now his view that even if he felt weak at the knees, he need not wholly abandon the notion of concentrating on the arc, since the reasons for his failure up till now were ‘no doubt errors due to lack of method rather than of substance’, and so his gaze passed from hammer to nail and back again as he examined first the one then the other, searching for some point on the notional arc on which he might focus all his attention and thereby direct the course that would result in the two points meeting; then, having quickly located two such possible points, nothing remained but to decide which of the two he should focus on. ‘The nail in the plank is stationary while the position of the hammer is variable …’ he meditated, looking up to heaven, and this meditation appeared to suggest that he should concentrate upon the latter, but on considering the question further with a clearer head, having observed the angle of the hammer as he tried to bring it down again, he was forced sourly to acknowledge that even should the hammer feel more secure in his grip his chances of hitting the nail on the head were no better than one in ten at best. ‘What matters,’ he corrected himself, ‘is where I want the contact to take place … Is … what it is I want to hammer in.’ The idea was appealing. ‘It is in fact the only thing that matters.’ And like someone who instinctively knows that he has finally discovered the right answer he stared at the target, the intensity of his gaze almost boring a hole in it, and, full of confidence, raised his hand. The aim was perfect and what was more, he noted with satisfaction, it could not possibly be more perfect; and as if to confirm the certainty of his control over the direction of the blow, all the other related manoeuvres suddenly appeared clear to him: he realized that his grip on the instrument had been quite wrong, that holding the handle at the end was much more comfortable; he now knew how much effort was required in a single stroke and from what distance the stroke should be applied for the full effect; and this moment of clarity also revealed to him that if he supported the nail with his thumb from below he really need not throw his whole body weight behind the hammer … Controlling his grip and movement in this way it was no wonder that the last two planks were affixed at lightning speed, and when he made a tour of the house to survey his handiwork (a considerable achievement, he thought) he corrected a few far from minor errors and returned to the hall, which swam in the low lamplight, regretting the sad fact that having finished the job he was in no position really to savour the smell of success. He would have liked to carry on hammering; he was intoxicated with ‘the smell of success’, with the discovery that after hours of clumsy failure in the realm of hammer, nail and arc, he had, albeit at the last moment, resolved his difficulties; furthermore, somewhere near the end of his tour of inspection, he was given a sudden unexpected insight into how the technique, because and indeed despite of which he had entered the modest outer chambers of the mystery, had so uniquely and confusingly directed his progress and resolved the ‘revolutionary thought’ that had seized him on his return from that shocking excursion and turned him into ‘an Eszter new-born, an utterly simplified Eszter’. It was indeed a sudden awakening, but, like all such awakenings, not wholly unheralded, for before he set out on his tour he had been aware only of the plainly laughable nature of his efforts, the chief of which was to prevent his left hand being battered to pieces, a piffling task to which he applied the whole might of his considerable intellect and only immediately after that realized that even if he employed his full visual powers it would still prove a vain enterprise, or at least, laughable as it was, indeed taking that laughability into account along with his earlier ignorance of tools and their application, that there was a deeper, more complex issue at stake, the nature of which was to allow him to master the art of banging in nails. He recalled various stages in his frantic efforts and the fact that even then, in what was imposing itself as a general frame of mind, he had suspected that any eventual resolution would not be due entirely to taking rational thought in the matter, a suspicion that had in the meantime become a certainty, for in divorcing the heavy artillery of his intellect (so typical of him) as he was, metaphorically, edging forward, or, in his own words, divorcing ‘the ostensible fire-power of a determined
general’ from ‘the chain of practical action and reaction’, he had achieved mastery not through the application of a logical experimental process but through constant, wholly involuntary adaptations to the moment-by-moment nature of necessity; a process that no doubt reflected his intellectual bent but took no cognition of it. To judge by appearances, he summarized, the clear lesson was that the serious issue underlying this apparently insignificant task had been resolved by a persistent assault embodying a flexible attitude to permutations, the passage from ‘missing the point’ to ‘hitting the nail on the head’ so to speak, owing nothing, absolutely nothing, to concentrated logic and everything to improvisation, to an ever new set of exploratory motions, or so he had thought as he set out on his tour of inspection of the house to check whether any loose boards needed more secure fixing; there was nothing to indicate that the body’s command mechanism, that well-oiled part of the human organism focused on the reality principle (he entered the kitchen) had imposed itself between the legislating mind and the executive hand and remained so well hidden that it could only be discovered, as he put it, ‘between, if such a thing were possible, the dazzling object of illusion and the eye that perceives that object, a position that entailed conscious recognition of the illusory nature of the object’. It seemed it was the very freedom of choice between the range of competing ideas that actually decided the angle, the height, and experimental path between the top of the arc and the point of the nail; on the other hand (he examined the two small windows of the servants’ room next to the kitchen), it was the conduct of the experiment employing the range of options open to him, his mechanical ability to orientate himself among an infinitely precise set of possibilities, or, to put it crudely and simply, the process of experimentation itself, which resolved itself and decided on the correct course among ‘the free choice of options’, a choice that was neither free nor allowed for the act of choosing, since apart from intervening in the order of events the only active option was the perceiving and evaluating of the upshot of the various experiments, the only conclusion to be drawn from which (‘To make a fine distinction… . ’Eszter considered, making a fine distinction in the process) is that the process had been instantaneously anthropomorphized, so that, as so often in the humblest of instances, as for example in the hammering in of a nail, one immediately put down one’s success in the search for a solution to some ‘wonderful’ idea or particulary ‘brilliant’ insight. But no (he continued his tour through Valuska’s room on the way to the drawing room) it was not we who controlled the process, it controlled us, this process that did nothing to disturb the appearance of our controlling it, not at least while our heads, our heads so full of ambitious ideas, fulfilled their modest obligations of perception and evaluation; as for the rest (he turned the handle of his door and smiled), the rest did not lie within the head’s scope (and thinking this he felt like a blind man suddenly able to see and therefore descry the true relationship between things, and remained rooted to the spot in the open doorway, his eyes closed, quite forgetting where he was). He was aware of millions of propositions, an eternally restless seething mass of events conducting an austere and eternal dialogue between themselves, every one of the million incidents, each of those million relationships, million but uniform and therefore in one single uniform relationship along with everything else, uniting in a single confluence of conflicting elements, between things that simply by existing resist and those which by virtue of being themselves strive to overcome that resistance. And he had a vision of himself as part of this saturated, living immensity, just as he had seen himself in the hall before the last window, and understood for the first time the power he had surrendered himself to, the kind of phenomenon he was being absorbed in. Because, at that moment, he comprehended the driving force behind all this: necessity providing the momentum for existence, momentum bringing forth preparation, preparation in turn paving the way for participation, a positive participation in the relationships thus prescribed, the point at which our very beings try to choose whatever is favourable through a set of predetermined exploratory reflexes, so that accomplishment should depend on them, and the question of whether such a relationship really existed naturally enough presented itself to him in passing, and it depended on patience, on the fine particulars and accidentals of the struggle, since the success of the enterprise, the achievement of a depersonalized sense of mere presence, he now acknowledged, and indeed saw, had a decidedly hit-or-miss kind of significance. He surveyed this endless, sharp, clear prospect and it shook him with its supremely exclusive reality, shook him because it was so hard to see that this world produced by his anxiety, a world of infinitely capacious reality had—for humankind at least—to come to an end, an end despite the fact that there was no end, and by that token no centre either, and we simply are, one element in the beating pulse of a space containing a million other elements, with which we harmonized and interacted with all our guiding reflexes … But of course on examination none of these things lasted longer than an instant and as soon as the glimmering vision cohered it splintered in the blinking of an eye; it splintered, its significance reduced to that of a spark which perhaps did no more than alert us to the dying of the fire in the grate which glowed once then disintegrated, as if aware of the worthlessness of its existence, dying in a single flash of light if only so its brief intensity might illuminate everything he had regarded on the way home, in his fateful decision, in the moment of judgement by the gate, as a ‘potentially fatal mistake’. He stepped over to the grate, examined the embers and did his best to bring them to life again, threw three logs on, then took a step towards the window, a pointless journey, since however hard he looked, instead of the boards and nails, all he saw was his own reflection. He saw himself in front of the Chez Nous Café, by the uprooted poplar, with the rubbish at his feet, for on this extraordinary day, this dramatic early afternoon, when he found himself chased, yes, that was the right word, chased from his house into the street, that was the point at which he faced defeat, the point at which he was forced to surrender and had to admit that however well primed his guns were, however coolly he appraised the situation, however he tried to apply whatever is normally referred to as ‘sober judgement’, whatever forces he brought to bear on the serried ranks of the opposition lined up against him were bound to fail. His first failure was the failure to understand and his incapacity to deal with the scale of decay, it was here he first acknowledged this (‘like someone suffering from a hereditary form of blindness …!’): what he could not know, however, was that it was precisely what he then did that was the crowning glory of this intellectual incapacity, the true defeat. For having failed to notice how ‘the predicted collapse of forms he had for decades considered dislocated’ should not have proved surprising, especially for him, he had also avoided the admission—and in this matter he was quite happy to concur with his earlier position—that the whole enterprise was not only doomed but had actually run aground, the avoidance having taken the following form: he had decided that whatever it was he had seen out in the street was not worth devoting the least attention to, and if the town itself, in its changed circumstances, chose so patently to ignore his own being, which was based on the values of ‘intelligence and good taste’, the only course open to him was to ignore it in turn. He had believed, and was indeed perfectly justified in believing, that this ‘endless preparation’ was aimed expressly at him, since it was set on utterly annihilating that which in him had always resisted whatever was vulgar and destructive; it would crush reason, that exercise of free clear thinking, in order to rob him of the one last refuge where he could remain free and clear. The thought of that last refuge drove him closer to Valuska, and in his anxious solicitude for him he decided to demolish the few rarely used rickety old bridges that still existed between him and the world, to apply the rules of his earlier self-distancing from an ever more lawless society with even greater rigour, to leave this fatal stew to rot by itself and withdraw completely with only hi
s friend for company. He would move to the other side of the river, Eszter decided, just past the waterworks, and in contemplating methods of turning his house in Wenckheim Street into a genuine fortress he bent every intellectual sinew to the task of maintaining absolute security: to maintaining it, or rather, to winning back everything the nightmare-like filth, the deserted street and the uprooted poplar had cast into doubt, while somehow retaining the hope that all the processes that constituted him might continue undisturbed. But he regained the first only at the expense of the second, since the price of his absolute security was precisely that he should not continue just as he was, should not continue because he could not continue, because, on their way back from that tiresome experience outside the White Collar Club, he had experienced a most curious feeling about what their common future might be like, about ‘the simple joys of resignation’. It was as if a great weight had fallen from his shoulders: he felt lighter and lighter and, having parted from Valuska at the corner of Hétvezér Passage, he had felt that lightness guiding him step by step and, regretting nothing, allowed himself to be led by it, recognizing that his identity, his very sense of selfhood, was being remorselessly dissolved in the process. In order to dissolve, to sink and emerge no more, there was one last thing he had to do: he had to draw the ultimate conclusion which was to decide that having arrived at the further shore in the land of blessed calm, he should ‘regard as a victory that which in actual fact was a bitter defeat’. He had to retreat to a point of inner security if only because the world outside had become a place of agonizing decay; he had to ignore the itch, the desire to intervene, for the purpose and significance of action were being corroded away by its thoroughgoing lack of significance; he had to distance himself because the only valid response of a sound mind to this process was to protest against it, or indeed to withdraw, to cut all contact with it and retain one’s distance (so Eszter had pondered as he made his way back home through the grinding cold), while at the same time continuing to pay attention to the increasingly meaningless state of things, to look long and hard at it, for to avert one’s eyes would be nothing short of cowardice, like substituting submissiveness for misapprehension, like running away from the truth that however he may have spoken up against ‘a world that was losing its grip on the law’ not for one moment had he ever lost touch with it. He had spoken up against it and had never ceased interrogating it, wanting to know why it was irrational; like a fly he kept buzzing in its ear and would not be waved away, but now the buzz was out of him, he had no desire left to keep buzzing because he understood that his tireless questioning and rebelling against the nature of things resulted not so much in the world becoming an adjunct to his intellect as in him becoming an adjunct to the world, the world’s prisoner if you like. He had been wrong, he decided a few steps from his house, wrong in assuming that steady decay was the essence of the situation, for that was in effect to say that some element of good persisted in it while there was no evidence of that whatsoever, and this walk had convinced him that there never could have been, not because it had been lost but because ‘the present state of the area’ never had the slightest shred of meaning in the first place. It was not meant to have a point; if it was meant for anything at all it was expressely for the purpose of having no point, Eszter had thought as he slowed and stopped before his entrance; it had neither decayed nor disintegrated under the pressure, since, in its own fashion, it was perfect and eternal, perfect without any hint of intention, as if the only order inherent in it was that which fitted it for chaos, and directing the heavy artillery of one’s intellect at it, peppering it day in, day out, desiring to take action against something that simply doesn’t exist nor ever will exist, to stare and stare at it until the eyeballs cracked, is not only exhausting (he fitted the key to the lock) but quite pointless. ‘I abjure thought,’ he had thought as he took a last look behind him. ‘Henceforth I will abjure all independent and lucid thought as if it were the crassest stupidity. I will deny the function of the mind, and, from this moment on, rely only on the inexpressible joy of my renunciation, on that only,’ Eszter repeated to himself. ‘No more showing off. I will be quiet at last, perfectly quiet.’ And he had turned the handle and entered, locking the door behind him. It was like being freed of a great weight and before he had even passed the threshold a wonderful sense of release flooded through him: it was as if he had left his old self, and everything that implied, out in the street, and had recovered his strength and all his old self-confidence, never to lose it again, until, step by step, he had lost it in the boarding up of the windows only to recover it, albeit in a different form, by the drawing-room window, not as a superior spirit passing judgement on ‘the terrible defects of the view outside’ but as one who responded humbly, knowing why things were as they were as if by instinct and therefore completely. What did it mean to think of this as something revolutionary, as indeed he did while contemplating his progress in the matter of nailing things from little details through to final adjustments and the extraordinary realization that sprang from it? The only revolutionary feeling he was aware of, or so he considered while standing in the doorway, was pride, his own pride, a pride that did not allow him to understand that there was no qualitative difference between things, a presumptuous over-confidence which condemned him to ultimate disillusion, for to live according to the spirit of qualitative difference requires superhuman qualities. Yet there was no real cause (he gently stroked one of the boards) for disillusionment, or rather there was no more cause for disillusionment than, for example, for wonder: in other words there was none; the fact that the human intellect was, unbeknown to itself, banished from the realm of ‘adjustment to the real nature of relationships between things’ did not necessarily imply that the universal anxiety implicit in the real nature of these relationships lacked all sense; nor did the fact that the human subject was merely an acquiescent servant to eternal anxiety necessarily imply a stark choice between disillusionment and wonder. If some frozen magical realm disappeared in the moment following that flash of enlightenment, its after-shocks did not, and he simply stood in the living wake of the fled vision feeling it pulse through him; nor could what he then felt be described as either disillusionment or wonder, it was more like being the recipient of a bequest, an acceptance of the fact that the nature of the vision far transcended him, a kind of patience, a kind of resignation to the will of the special grace which allowed him to comprehend only as much as he was capable of comprehending. And in that moment he understood that the apparently momentous decision he had taken while standing in the doorway was pure childish ignorance, that his opinions about the terrible gap in the intelligibility and rational development of things were based on gross error, the cumulative error of ‘some sixty years’, sixty years of living with a metaphorical cataract in one’s eye which, naturally, prevented him seeing what he now saw so clearly; that mind (he meditated the complex lines of the grain in one of the boards) was not so much a painful lacuna in the world-order as an integral part of it, the world’s shadow. It was the world’s shadow because in its eternal agitated dialogue it moved in synchronicity with the instincts that governed our being and that was its task, to interpret this phenomenon in all its delicacy and complexity, not to tell us anything about the purpose of the dialogue, since the thing it shadowed would not inform us about anything but the nature of its own movement. To be more accurate, Eszter continued, it was only a shadow in the mirror, a mirror where the image and the mirror wholly coincided though the shadow nevertheless tried to separate them, to separate two things that had from eternity been the same and could not be separated or cut into two, thereby losing the weightless delight of being swept along within it, substituting, he thought as he stepped away from the drawing-room window, a solid eternity purchased with knowledge for the sweet song of participating in eternity, a song so airy it was lighter than a feather. He moved towards the door, his head bowed. That’s how it will be, like a withdrawn invitation, the whole intellectual p
rocess ‘finding itself precisely by discarding the role of the intellect, finding itself, or rather finding something else that persists in existing despite the odds, that self which by wandering through the labyrinth of its own nature leaves behind confused memorials which bear witness both to invitation and to withdrawal. And that’s how it will be, contemplated Eszter as he ambled on: the intangible contents of the ‘world’ that arises out of this dialogue which is itself so resistant to interpretation and which raises the insoluble question of ‘what, after all, is the point?’, act as a warning to the insatiable, a net to catch infinity, a language to capture that which is brilliant, and that is how one becomes two, the thing itself and its significance. That significance, like a hand, would first trace then gather up the apparently stray threads of this mysterious mixture, would hold them together like mortar in a brick wall, but—and here he smiled, feeling the radiant heat of the fire as he approached it—even if this hand, much like his own, were to release the strands, this dialogue of opposing forces would go on, nor would the wall collapse. It would not collapse, just as he himself would not collapse, but he had to let go of all he had once clung on to, for this was a vital part of the process of simple realization, the realization that knowledge led either to wholesale illusion or to irrational depression, and by the time he had returned from the drawing room into the hall he was not ‘thinking’ as such any more, which is not say he had ‘given up’ thinking or ‘retracted’ what he had thought up to this point but that he acknowledged the fact that he was liberated from the passion of self-referential questioning, and through this liberation—similar to the kind he had experienced on the afternoon when following his encounter with Frachberger he relinquished music, but this time perhaps, in a genuinely revolutionary fashion—he could bid farewell to the illusions that led to such terrible depressions. Farewell to those countless moments of consciousness when he was forever losing the status he had tried so stubbornly to maintain, farewell to the idiotic necessity of making decisions, for now, at last, he was capable of ‘assessing’ his own situation correctly; farewell to all that, it was over, thought Eszter, and, on this extraordinary evening, he could practically hear the loud rumble as his whole previous life collapsed around him, and if life had been one constant rushing about before this—a rush ‘forward’, a rush to ‘achieve’ something, a rush to ‘escape’ from something—and having finished his tour of inspection and arrived back at the very last board he had hammered in, he took it for granted that he had succeeded in halting the onward rush, had finally landed with his feet on the ground rather than bouncing off again, had, after all that preparation, finally arrived reassuringly ‘somewhere’. He stood in the relative gloom with his arms by his sides, the hammer in his lowered hand, with the genuine ‘smell of success’ in his nostrils, gazing at one of those notable nails, or rather at a gay little pinpoint of light that might have been produced by the light trickling from the open door of the drawing room (he had neglected to shut it) or, perhaps, by the weak effulgence of the ceiling light above him; he gazed at it as if it were the full stop at the end of a sentence, since, here and now, it signalled the end not only of his circular tour but of his last train of thought, so that after his extended detour and eventual ‘release from the massive weight of thinking’ he should find himself back where he started, returning home with a never-before-experienced sense of lightness. Having been granted a glimpse into the true nature of relationships, having just now experienced the adventure of comprehending and realizing, having recovered from the extraordinary effort of recognizing in a very unlikely manner the unlikely manner in which he had arrived at the decisive moment of resignation, the happy little glimmer on the head of the nail conjured nothing more or less than a mysterious, unforgettable sensation that had surprised him on his way home, that despite the apparently insufferable condition of the town, he was glad simply to be alive, glad that he was breathing, that Valuska would soon be here beside him, glad of the warm glow of the fire in the drawing room and of the house, which henceforth would be a real home, his home (Eszter looked about him) where the tiniest thing possessed some significance, and so he put the hammer down on the floor, divested himself of Mrs Harrer’s apron and hung it on the hook in the kitchen and returned to the drawing room so he could rest a little before lighting a fire in Valuska’s room. It was a mysterious sensation but one that was born of simplicity rather than complexity: everything about him regained its original significance in the most natural way, the window became a window you could look out of again, the fire became a fire which gave out heat, and the drawing room ceased to be a refuge from ‘all-consuming devastation’ in much the same way as the outside world was no longer the scene of ‘insufferable torture’. It was through that outside world that Valuska was roaming, perhaps hurrying (if he was keeping his promise); so he lay down and slowly spread himself across the bed, reminding himself that the scene outside the window was no longer identical with the one he had seen that afternoon, and that therefore, maybe, or so something whispered to him, the nightmarish rubbish there, like the odours or poisons rising from some magical ‘Slough whose name was Despond’, was merely the vision of a sick mind, the vision of a sick mind that after a long sojourn in darkness found an object on which it might project its fantasies; for one could regard the accumulation of rubbish outside, just as one might regard the fears of the irrational and confused populace, as something that could eventually be tidied up. But this possibility of cleansing and regeneration was only a momentary thought, for the drawing room now occupied his entire attention: the furniture, the carpet, the mirror and the lamp, the cracks in the ceiling and the joyful flames leaping in the fire. He couldn’t explain, however he tried, the feeling that he was here for the first time, that this refuge from ‘human stupidity’ had suddenly become an invulnerable island of peace, reconciliation and grateful satiety. He had taken everything into account: old age, loneliness, the possible fear of death, the sense of yearning beyond some ultimate calm, the notion of being in the grip of choking panic at seeing his horrific predictions come true; the possibility that he had gone mad, that the sudden turnaround in his life represented a cowardly retreat from the genuine dangers of taking further thought, that it was the cumulative result of all the foregoing, but whichever way he looked at it none of these seemed sufficient reason for his current condition, indeed, he considered, nothing could be more sober, more balanced than the attitude with which he now surveyed the world. He adjusted his deep-claret-coloured smoking jacket, linked the fingers of his hands together behind his neck, and, as he noticed the feeble ticking of his watch, suddenly realized that he had been escaping all his life, that life had been a constant escape, escape from meaninglessness into music, from music to guilt, from guilt and self-punishment into pure ratiocination, and finally escape from that too, that it was retreat after retreat, as if his guardian angel had, in his own peculiar fashion, been steering him to the antithesis of retreat, to an almost simple-minded acceptance of things as they were, at which point he understood that there was nothing to be understood, that if there was reason in the world it far transcended his own, and that therefore it was enough to notice and observe that which he actually possessed. And he really had ‘retreated into an almost simple-minded acceptance of things as they were’, because now, as he closed his eyes for a few minutes, he was aware of nothing but the velvety parameters of his home: the protective embrace of the roof over his head, the security of the rooms between which he could freely pass, the permanent half-light of his book-lined hall which faithfully followed the right-angled plan of the building and seemed to convey the calm of the garden, which looked neglected right now, but would be flowering by the time spring came round; he seemed to hear anew the sound of footsteps—Mrs Harrer’s buttoned slippers, Valuska’s boots—sounds that had etched themselves deep into his memory; could taste the air outside and smell the dust within; was aware of the soft swelling of the floorboards and the practically edible haze arou
nd the individual light bulbs in the lamp; and he knew that all these, the tastes, scents, colours, sounds—the beneficial sweetness of the wholly circumscribing shelter—differed from the delights conjured by a happy dream only in that there was no need to keep conjuring them up, because they had not passed away, because they existed and would, Eszter was certain, continue to exist. And so sleep overtook him and when he woke a few hours later it was to the warmth of the pillow under his head. He did not open his eyes straight away, and because he thought that he had been asleep only a few minutes as he had intended, the warmth of the pillow brought to mind the protective air of the house as it seemed just before he fell asleep and he thought he could pick up the grateful review of his worldly wealth precisely at the point that he had left it. He felt there was time to sink into the peaceful silence which hugged him as close as did the blanket his body, into the impregnable order of permanence where everything remained as it was, where furniture, carpet, mirror and lamp waited undisturbed to receive him, and where there would be time to take stock of the tiniest detail and discover every part of what now revealed itself to be his inexhaustible treasure trove, gauging, in his imagination, the distance between his current position and the hall, a distance that seemed to be constantly increasing, but one that would soon be entered by the one person who would give meaning to all of this: Valuska. Because every element of this ‘beneficial sweetness’ referred to him: Valuska was the cause and subject of every process, and though he had suspected it, he had not been so keenly aware that this decisive turn in his life was not the result of some intangible accident but the work of the only person who had visited him these many long years, the man who acted as the mysterious antidote to his own daily more refined sense of bitterness, the true lineaments of whose face and whose terrible vulnerability he had only just now, in his half-asleep half-awake state, perceived in all its striking essence, or rather, had discovered earlier today, on the way back home from the Chez Nous Café. On the way back from there, but first, properly, in Hétvezér Passage, shortly after glimpsing the café and the fallen tree, when, shaken by the sight and thinking himself quite alone, the thought flashed through his mind that he was not in fact alone; it was a moment, almost an insignificant micro-second of consciousness, but so unexpected, so deep, that it was immediately transformed into anxiety for his companion, a process that took place so quickly the thought disappeared into it; disappeared, absorbed into his anxiety, into his decision to withdraw when faced by the intolerable imbalance he saw in town which provided him with unquestionable proof of the nameless elements of that realization, without any idea what he was surrendering to in escaping into plans of their future life together. Nor did this vague and cloudy sensation leave him, it hovered over him every step of the way home, in the full overview of the happenings of the afternoon and evening: it hid there like a secret explanation as to why he should feel so tearful at the moment of their separation; it was to this that ‘the unprecedent lightness of heart he had experienced on his way home’ testified; it was there in the decision he took in the gateway, in every detail of the steps he took to barricade the house and in the tour of inspection and readjustment afterwards; and, finally, it was there in the new wealth of meaning to be discovered in his own imperium: in every corner of the house, in the half-light of his waking dream, at the very axis of all the events of this extraordinary day, there stood Valuska, fully revealed now for the first time. He felt that he could see what it was that touched him, was convinced that he grasped it immediately, at the very beginning, the thing he now confronted like an image carved into stone, for it was only one image that actually nourished him, one image that resulted in him changing the course of his entire life. In fact, looking back at it, he thought, he couldn’t help but recognize it, for then, back at the ‘flash of intuition’, it appeared with a tidal force, something ungovernable, silent, that drove you forward without you noticing. In that particular moment, leaving the Chez Nous Café behind, having passed the sadly fallen tree, somewhere between the coffee house and the fur-trader’s, he, Eszter, had stopped, arrested by an overwhelming mixture of indignation and untold despair, and, putting out his arm, had stopped Valuska in his tracks too. He said something, pointed to the rubbish as if to ask his companion whether he too had noticed it, and, glancing at him, noticed merely that the look of shining attention—the ‘glow’, as he described it—which had only lately left Valuska’s face had now returned. An instinct told him that something had happened the instant before to challenge and question that look, and he stared harder but found nothing to confirm the hunch, so continued on his way—already yielding to his unconscious thought—without suspecting anything: genuinely unsuspecting, but having solved everything, he thought as he woke from his half-dozing state into full consciousness, the whole incident with Valuska resolving into a tableau, a manifestation touching in its simplicity, and everything that had happened in the course of the afternoon and evening finally and forcefully coming into focus. What he then felt, he now saw: his trusty protector standing there beside him, his shoulders sagging, his head bowed, with the houses of Hétvezér Passage all around him, as the other he, his old enfeebled friend Eszter, pointed at the rubbish; his shoulders sagging, his head bowed, not as the tell-tale sign of a sudden attack of melancholy, but, and the realization almost broke his heart, because he was resting; resting because he too had tired, having practically had to carry someone who could hardly stand on his own feet; resting, furtively, as if he were a little ashamed of having to rest, as if he could not imagine burdening his fellow with the confession of his own weakness while he looked on: he could see it now again just as it had been. He saw the sagging shoulders and the postman’s cloak as it rucked up over the bent back, saw the bowed head as a few stray wisps of hair escaped from his cap to hang over his eye, saw the bag slung crosswise over his shoulder … and, lower down, the worn-out boots … and he felt he knew everything there was to know about this tragic image, that he understood perfectly everything that could possibly be understood about it. Then he had a vision of Valuska on a previous occasion, a long time ago—was it six, seven or even eight years ago? He couldn’t remember exactly—when, following Mrs Harrer’s advice (‘What we need round here, I tell you, is a man, someone to get your meals in!’) that very afternoon, he made his first appearance in the drawing room, closely trailing behind her; how he shyly explained what he was doing there, protesting that he’d rather not accept the money offered, and, furthermore, would happily undertake, ‘free of charge’, whatever errands Mr Eszter chose to entrust him with, such as going to the shops or posting a letter, or, from time to time, tidying the yard if there were the opportunity—how he added, rather apologetically, as if it were the owner of the house that was doing him a favour, that a person might of course be perfectly justified in finding such an offer somewhat strange, and then, making a self-deprecatory gesture with his hand, broke into a smile. And in this manner a kind of self-evident benevolence entered, not only his yard, but his life, so that he became utterly dependent on it; a self-sacrificing, invisible, unshakeable, ever industrious, caring kind of benevolence: as Mrs Harrer cared for the fabric of the house, so Valuska protected his employer from himself, while he looked on as his domain perished before his very eyes (was it six, seven or eight years ago? At least seven, he thought). And, to the best of his ability, Valuska preserved him by his sheer presence even when he was not actually there, for the knowledge that he was on his way shielded Eszter from the most serious consequences of his mind’s tendency to self-destruct, or, at least, brought some relief from that tendency, made its effects less painful, diverted disastrous trains of thought constantly aimed at ‘the world’ from fatally striking down the poor fugitive figure that conceived them; in other words, saved him, Eszter—who was a living demonstration of how the fixed ideas of the day, in their short-sighted vanity, wanted to redefine every human institution and were busily tearing apart the fabric of the town and indeed the whole count
ry (which fully deserved its fate) and would have done so had Valuska ‘the genius of the wide-eyed stare’ not awakened him this morning—from paying the bitter price of the destruction wreaked upon life with its indefinable wealth, its organic mechanism based on ‘valid relationships between elements of reality’, by the town and indeed the country, or rather by all the fixed ideas, all those acts of short-sighted vanity, every judgemental train of thought that wanted to view ‘the world’ from its own limited viewpoint. But Valuska had indeed woken him this morning, or maybe it was just the feeling he had first experienced outside the Chez Nous Café which had lasted until this moment of drowsy consciousness, in either case, at that moment he was compelled to understand what it was that his friend’s steadfastness and love protected him from; at that moment he had to recognize that his existence—hitherto based on the twin values of ‘intelligence and good taste’, on his so-called independent and clear thinking and on the ability of his spirit to soar, as he had always secretly believed, above the mundane—was not worth a fly’s fart: it was the moment he had to admit that nothing interested him any more but the steadfast love of his friend. Whenever, in this period of about seven years, he had thought of his young friend it was always as ‘the intangible embodiment of the airy angelic realm at the point where it overflows into the mundane’, something wholly ethereal, wholly transformed into spirit and pure flight, not a creature of flesh and blood but an immaterial being worthy of scientific investigation who entered and left his dwelling almost as a good fairy might; but now he saw him differently: his peaked cap on his head, his postman’s cloak down to his ankles, he enters the house about lunchtime, lightly knocking first, says hello, then, the job being finished, he proceeds down the hall with the food container clanking on his shoulder, on tiptoe in his clumsy boots so as not to disturb the tranquil air of the drawing room, moves further still and reaches the gateway, having lightened, at least until his next visit, the atmosphere of the house which had been heavy with its master’s obsessions, having healed him with his mysterious benevolence, tender care and highly complex ‘simplicity’—and though that simplicity is perhaps a little ridiculous, it is its touching delicacy that surrounds him, that makes it the most natural thing in the world for him to attend to all his master’s needs, that enables him to render service with such absolute and profound constancy. Eszter was wide awake by now but remained perfectly still on the bed, for in his imagination Valuska’s face had suddenly appeared before him, Valuska’s face with its great eyes and high brow, its long red nose like something from a folk tale and his mouth fixed in a gentle smile—and it seemed to him that just as he had discovered the true element of ‘home’ lurking behind the façade of his house, so now, for the first time, he could descry the lineaments of the true face behind the apparent face; that behind the detached ‘celestial aspect’ of Valuska’s features, which in the course of his feverish wanderings would be distilled to an ‘angelic’ glow, he could discover the original earthiness. Which is to say that it was simply there; as far as he was concerned the process whereby the face resolved itself into a smile, or having emerged from a solemn mood brightened up again, simply revealed the fact there was nothing further to seek in it: the smile was enough, the solemnity and the brightening were sufficient; he understood that the celestial aspect was no longer of real interest to him, that it was the face and the face alone that mattered to him: it was the face of Valuska not Valuska’s vision of the universe that counted. The sobriety of that face, which wore a perpetual expression of concern for the ordered well-being of the drawing room and its occupant, an order that occupant was forever disarranging, was, thought Eszter, a model of circumspection and conscientiousness, showing a readiness to attend to minor tasks and tiny details, a readiness he himself was now imbued with, having opened his eyes, sat up in bed, looked around and considered what else he should do in preparation for the return of his friend. His original plan was to follow the barricading of the windows and the heating of the rooms with the blocking of the gate and of the door that opened on to the yard, but since the significance of the barricades had radically changed, even in a moment, as had the way he viewed the sheer notion of barricading, the manner in which it had been executed so far and all the other stuffing and padding out of his home, the whole thing having turned into a sorry memorial to his own folly, he decided to devote his entire attention to the question of a room for Valuska, that is to say he would light a fire, tidy up if necessary, prepare the bedding and wait for his enthusiastic helpmate (who was no doubt rambling about town, busily completing his ‘mission’), wait, that is, for the thought of returning to the house in Wenckheim Avenue, as he had promised, to occur to him. He took it for granted that Valuska was doing what he always did, walking the streets somewhere, or had found his way to the event advertised in Hétvezér Passage and got delayed in the crowd, and he became anxious only when he had glanced at the clock a few times and realized that rather than dozing off for a minute or two, he had been asleep for almost five hours; pretty close to five hours anyway, he realized with a shock, and leapt out of bed ready to run in two directions at once, the first to make the fire in the next room, the second—for lack of a window—to dash down to the gate and look out for Valuska. In fact he did neither because he noticed that the fire had gone out in the drawing room, so his first thought was to relight it, and he did so, piling up as much wood as possible with a few bits of newspaper underneath the lot. But the fire refused to start—he had to take the pile of logs apart and relight it twice before the flames leapt up and spread—and even so, this task was as nothing to the one that awaited him in the next room, where he spent an entire hour trying and failing to light a Calor-gas stove that had not been used in years. He tried to recall the method used by Mrs Harrer, but it was no use, the wood resolutely defied all attempts to light it: he piled it into a pyramid, he threw it on loosely, anyhow, he tried flapping the stove door, he blew as hard as he could, but nothing happened, everything remained as it was but for a plume of thick smoke; it was as if in its long period of enforced idleness the stove had forgotten its own function and could not remember what to do in this situation. But by this time Valuska’s intended nest had taken on the look of a battlefield, the floor strewn with sooty planks and boards, ash everywhere, he alone toiling through spots of smoke, escaping into the drawing room every couple of minutes in search of fresh air and glimpsing, in the course of one of these excursions, the state of his smoking jacket, which immediately recalled to his mind the apron Mrs Harrer had left in the kitchen, a thought that should have cheered him up but didn’t until he was on his way into the drawing room again when the soft roar of something catching fire struck his ears and he turned round, reassured that the struggle had not been altogether in vain, for now it was as if someone had unplugged the chimney: the Calor-gas heater was working again. Because it had taken so long to get the fire going, he didn’t think there would be time to remove the boards from the windows that here too gave on to the street, so leaving all the doors as wide as he could, he encouraged the smoke to disperse through the small servants’ room via the kitchen and the hall, then tried to rub his smoking jacket clean of soot, but only succeeded in further begriming it; having wasted some minutes warming to the task, he gave up, donned Mrs Harrer’s apron, and with cloth, broom and pan in one hand and a litter bin in the other hastened into Valuska’s room to remove evidence of the mess he had created. If the vitrines full of porcelain, cutlery and sea-shells and the carved dining table and bed had hitherto, under the custodianship of Mrs Harrer, lent the place a museum-like air, that air was now somewhat singed and the museum looked like something the fire brigade had only just left, a little ruefully perhaps, in response to a call to greater heroism; everything was covered in soot and ash, and if it wasn’t then it was as if he had been afflicted with the curse of Mrs Harrer—he himself besmirched it; though he knew quite well it wasn’t so much the curse of Mrs Harrer but his own excitement and carelessness tha
t were responsible, distracted as he was from his task by the necessity of continually listening out for the long-awaited knock on the drawing-room window which would accord with their agreed arrangement, knowing as they did that the janitor locked the gates in the early evening. Having given the bed a bit of a dust down and loaded up the Calor stove, he decided to abandon the pointless task, thinking they might continue it together in the morning, and returned to the drawing room, where he grabbed a chair and sat down by the fire. He kept glancing at the clock, one minute thinking, ‘It’s already half-past three,’ the next, ‘It’s not a quarter to four yet’—the hour seeming too early or too late depending on his state of mind. At one moment it seemed certain his friend wasn’t coming, either because he had forgotten his promise or because he had decided that not having been able to arrive in time he would under no circumstances disturb him in the middle of the night; at the next he felt sure Valuska was still sitting by the newspaper-collection point in the station, or with the hotel porter at the Komló, where he never failed to call in the course of his nocturnal roaming, and he began to calculate how long it would take him to arrive if it should occur to him to leave at that particular moment. Later there were intervals when he no longer thought in terms of, ‘It’s already a quarter to …’ or ‘It’s not four yet …’ when he seemed to hear someone tapping at the window, and then he hurried to open the gate, looked out, and in the light emitted by the peculiar circus, the cinema and the high illumination of the Komló, which seemed to have gathered a large if aimless-looking crowd, established that no one had in fact knocked, and so withdrew, disappointed, to take up his place again. It also occurred to him that Valuska might have called while he was sleeping, that, no one having answered his knock, he might have decided not to pursue the matter and gone home, or—Eszter speculated—it might be, as had happened, if only rarely, that someone had plied him with drink, possibly at the circus, or more likely at Hagelmeyer’s, where he did in fact call every day, and he was ashamed to appear before him in that state. He considered the now faint, now all too significant clues, lay down, got up, put more fuel on the two fires, then rubbed his eyes and, so as to keep awake, settled down in the armchair that Valuska used in the afternoons. But he couldn’t keep it up: his hips began to ache and his damaged left hand felt as though it was burning; so he quickly decided not to wait any longer, only to reverse the decision a few minutes later, when he thought he’d wait until the big hand reached twelve, but then he woke to realize that the clock showed nine minutes past seven and it seemed as though someone was really rattling the window-pane. He stood up, held his breath and listened in the silence because this time he wanted to be sure he wasn’t imagining it, that his frayed nerves weren’t merely playing tricks on him, but a second bout of knocking resolved all his doubts and swept away any feeling of fatigue owing to his vigil, so by the time he left the drawing room, having drawn the key from his pocket, and was hurrying down the hall, he was fully alert and in keen spirits, and he reached the gate in such a state of freshness and joyous anticipation that despite the stultifying cold as he turned the key, the long, apparently endless hours of waiting seemed merely to form the substance of something he could recount to his visitor, who, unaware that he was no longer a visitor but a lodger, had after all arrived. But to his greatest disappointment it was not Valuska but Mrs Harrer standing before him, moreover Mrs Harrer in a clearly anxious state and behaving most oddly, for before he could take proper stock of her, without any explanation as to what she wanted at this hour, she had slid past him through the gate, run into the hall wringing her hands and made her way into the drawing room, where she did something she had never done before, sat down in one of the armchairs, unbuttoned her coat and looked at him with such a forlorn expression she appeared to have lost her tongue and could only sit there, staring at him with an all too eloquent air of panic. She was wearing her usual outfit, the extra-thick skirt, the lemon-coloured cardigan and the brick-red overcoat, but this was all that brought to mind the Mrs Harrer of the previous morning when, in the secure knowledge that she had done a good job, she had exchanged her buttoned house-slippers for the lined boots she always wore outside, shuffled out and left the house, shouting, ‘Back on Wednesday!’ through the door. She had one hand on her heart while the other hung helplessly at her side, her red eyes had dark rings under them and for the first time Eszter noticed that her cardigan was badly buttoned up—altogether she gave the impression of someone who had been broken by some terrible tribulation that had shaken her to the core, to the extent that she didn’t know where she was or quite what had happened to her and was bitterly waiting for an answer to these questions. ‘I’m still frightened, professor, sir,’ she gasped breathlessly and shook her head in despair. ‘I still can’t believe it’s the end, though,’ her voice broke, ‘the army is already here!’ Eszter stood by the fire, astonished, not having understood a word of this, and when he saw her dissolve in tears again he took a step forward to calm her, but feeling that if she wanted to cry there was nothing he could do, thought better of it and sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Believe me, professor, sir, I don’t know if I’m dead or alive …’ She sniffed and pulled a crumpled handkerchief from her coat pocket. ‘I just came because my husband told me I should come, but really, I dunno if I’m dead …’ she wiped her eyes ‘… or alive …’ Eszter cleared his throat. ‘But what happened!’ Mrs Harrer gestured dismissively. ‘I told them before it would happen. I told you, professor, sir, you will remember, when the tower shook in the Göndölcs Gardens. It was no secret.’ Eszter was beginning to lose his patience. Clearly, her husband was drunk again and must have fallen down and struck his head on something. But what had the army to do with this? What does it mean? What does all this chaos add up to? He would have liked to lie down and sleep for just a few hours until Valuska turned up, and that would be about noon now, the usual time. ‘Try starting at the beginning, Mrs Harrer.’ The woman dabbed at her eyes again, then rested her hands in her lap. ‘I don’t properly know where to start. You can’t just begin talking about it like that, because I saw neither hide nor hair of him all day yesterday from morning through to night, and I said to myself, all right, wait till he gets home, I’ll sort him out, as I’m sure the professor will understand, what with him going off just like that with every penny, while I, well I mean he’s honest enough but I’m practically busting a gut with the amount of work I do, though of course it’s what you expect from a drunkard, there’s nothing to be done about it, and me waiting all day for him to come home so I can give him what for. I look at the clock, six o’clock, seven, half-past seven, then at eight, I say to myself, he’ll be properly drunk by now, like a blessed newt, and it’s only yesterday he was nearly dead with a hangover what with his heart, it’s not strong, you know, but at least, I say to him, not on a day like this, not when the whole town is full of those dark-skinned hooligans and something’s sure to happen to him as he staggers home, and on top of it there’s that whale, or whatever they call the blasted thing, don’t forget that, I say to myself. Of course, I might have guessed what would come of it! There I am watching the clock in the kitchen, the washing-up finished, I’ve gone round with the broom, turned the t.v. on and I’m looking at the operetta that was on before but they’re showing it again by popular demand, then out into the kitchen once more to check the time and it’s half-past nine. I’m really worried by then, as he never stays out so long, even when he is really swinish drunk he’s home at that time. When he’s drunk, I mean, he’s no good at all, he’s got to lie down and falls asleep but then he gets cold so he comes home. But no, I’m just sitting there, watching the t.v. without taking it in as I keep thinking about him, what could have happened to him, him being not a young man any more, so he should have more sense, I say to myself, than to wander round the streets at this hour of night, as there’s a lot of them dark-skinned hooligans about making a racket, because I knew quite well what would happen, that things would turn out like th
is, I said it would be so, as the professor might recall, when the tower shook, but no …’ Mrs Harrer continued, wringing her handkerchief, ‘it’s gone eleven and I’m still sitting in front of the t.v., the national anthem’s come and gone and the set is making that hissing noise but he’s still not back. Well, by that time I couldn’t stand it any more, I went and called in on the neighbours in case they had any idea. I ring, I knock, I tap at the window, it’s as if they hadn’t heard me, there’s not a stir although they’re home, I mean where else would they be in this weather when the tip of your nose is liable to freeze solid in that deep frost? So I begin to call them, pretty loud, to make sure they know it’s me so they can let me in, and at last they do but when I ask about my husband they don’t know anything. Then, as an afterthought, my neighbour says do I know what’s happening in town tonight? How should I know? I tell them. Well there’s a lot of unrest, a real rebellion. They’re smashing things up all over the place, and I’m thinking my husband’s out there, and believe me, professor, sir, I thought I was going to collapse there right in front of the neighbours, I could hardly stand and just about got home, but once I was in the kitchen I had to sit down on a chair, like a sack, with my head in my hands, like I felt it was going to burst. I thought of all kinds of things, best not even mention them, and the last thing was that maybe he’d come home and hid himself in the laundry room where Valuska lives, as he had often done that before and taken shelter with him until he’d sobered up a bit, Valuska looking after him, but if he’d known the upshot of it my husband never would have gone there, because even if he drinks and runs off with the housekeeping he’s an honest man really, and I couldn’t deny it. So I take a look, open the door and fair enough there’s nobody there so I go back into the house, but I’m so tired by then, what with working all day not to mention the anxiety, I thought I’d faint with exhaustion, so I had another think and decided I would at least occupy myself and brew up some coffee, which would wake me up a bit. The professor knows me after all these years, I haven’t been one to linger over work, but believe me, heaven knows it took me almost half an hour to put the wretched coffee on the gas stove and I hardly had strength enough to unscrew the lid of the jar, I had no power in my arms at all and on top of that I was clumsy as my attention was gone and I kept forgetting what I had gone to do, though eventually I managed to put the pot on and get the flame lit. I drink the coffee and wash the cup, take another look at the time and see it’s midnight so I decide to do something, as anything’s better than sitting in that kitchen and waiting, waiting all the time and him not coming, I’m sure the professor knows what it feels like watching the hands of the clock go round, as I’ve had plenty of opportunity to do, since as long as I can remember, for forty years or so I’ve done little else but work and look at the clock, wondering whether he is coming, Lord knows what I’ve done to deserve a husband like this, I could have done better for myself. Anyway, I made my mind up, threw some clothes on, those you see me in now, but I’d gone only a few steps when I see, pretty close to me, some fifty or so people at the nearest corner, I didn’t need telling who or what they were, I just knew as soon as I heard a loud smash, I looked neither left nor right but got straight back in that house and locked the gate, and I said to myself I must turn the light off, and believe me as I sat there in complete darkness my heart was beating fit to burst as the noise of smashing got nearer and nearer, nor could you mistake that sound. You can’t imagine what I went through then, sir, as I was sitting there, I almost stopped breathing …’ Mrs Harrer broke into fresh sobbing, ‘all by myself with no one to help me in that empty house and I couldn’t even run across to the neighbours now, I just had to sit there and wait to see what would happen. It was dark as death in there, but I shut my eyes too so I shouldn’t see anything, as hearing it was enough as they smashed the two upstairs windows, and I could hear the glass splintering below, four big panes of glass there were, as we’d had the upstairs windows double-glazed, but I didn’t give it a thought then how I’d worked a whole week so we could pay the price of them, I just sat there and prayed to God they’d be satisfied with that, as I was afraid they’d come into the yard and who knows what they’d have thought of doing then, perhaps they’d have demolished the house if it occurred to them. But then God heard my prayer and they went away and I stayed there with those two broken windows listening to my heart thumping as they were smashing the neighbour’s windows by then, but I still didn’t dare turn the light on, God help me, and I didn’t stir for an hour after that, then felt my way about, went into the room, lay down on the bed just as I was, and lay there as if dead, listening carefully, minute by minute, in case they came back to smash the two ground-floor windows. I haven’t the words, don’t even have the time to tell you everything that went through my mind, the end of the world, the gates of hell being opened, all kinds of nonsense, the professor will know far better than me the things I thought of, I just lay there like a plank for hours on end but my eyes wouldn’t stay closed, though the best thing would have been to go to sleep and not have those ridiculous ideas running through my head, because by the time my husband came home, seeing as he finally did get home about dawn, I was in no fit state to be cheerful about him being restored to me, as he wasn’t even drunk but stood by the bed sober as a judge, sat down on the covers just as he was with all his clothes on, in his coat and all, and tried to put my mind at rest as he could see I was lying there hardly full of the joys of spring and practically dead to the world, and I said to myself, pull yourself together, it’s all right, he’s home now, we’ll get by somehow. He brought me a glass of water from the kitchen and when I drank it I started slowly gathering my wits about me so we turned the light on in the room, as I wouldn’t let him do that before, but my husband said it was time to calm down and we should turn it on as it’s on in the kitchen in any case so why should I give myself a headache on account of two broken windows, the council would pay for them. He saw them when he came in the house, as he would of course, the shattered bits lying there in the entrance, though I didn’t even dare look at them, but as he said after he returned from taking the glass back out into the kitchen, the council would deal with it as he had influence there now. By that time I had recovered to the extent that I sat up in the bed and asked him what had happened, where he had been all night, and didn’t he have a drop of humanity left in him? I went on the attack, leaving me alone in an empty house while he was out there, skulking about outside, though what I really wanted to say was heaven be praised, how good to have you back, what a miracle no harm has come to you, but you know how it is, professor, the fear and those dark-skinned hooligans, not to mention the double-glazing in those two windows being gone. But my husband he just sits and hears me out and keeps looking at me in this strange way, and I ask him, for God’s sake, what’s happened? what’s going on? and I am about to tell him all about the windows on the upper floor, but my husband he says, what’s happened has happened and he raises his finger and says from today you’ll have to change your view of me, I’m on the town council or whatever they call it, and what’s more, he says, I’m getting some sort of medal too. Well, professor, sir, you may gather I couldn’t understand a word of this and just stared at him, his head nodding, then he says they spent the whole night in negotiations, no, not in the pub he says, but in the town hall, because he’s involved in a special something or other, some kind of committee that has saved the town from the hooligans. That’s all very well, I answer, but while you’re in session I’m prey to all kinds of dangers here in this empty house, not even being able to turn a light on. To which he answers, stop this nonsense, I was awake the whole night all on account of you and everyone else’s safety, then asks me if there’s anything here to drink, but by that time I was so happy to have him home again, that he was all right, sitting there on the bed beside me, I told where he could find some and he went through to the pantry and fetched the bottle of brandy from behind the jars of preserves, since that’s where I ke
ep it as, sad to say, I have to hide it. I ask him who those people were, those in the street, and my husband replies, sinister forces, but we stopped them all right, they’re being rounded up right now, he says, as the army has arrived and there’s order now, and he takes a swig of the bottle, soldiers everywhere, says he, imagine, they’ve even brought a tank with them, it’s there in Friars’ Walk in front of the church, and I let him take another swig but then said Enough! and put the bottle down beside me on the bed. How did the army get here, I ask him, as I couldn’t imagine a tank there, and he says it was the circus, the circus was behind it all, if the circus hadn’t been here they’d never have dared attack the town, but attack it they did, my husband says, and I can see the gooseflesh running over him too and his face really clouding over, they attacked it, and looted and set buildings on fire, and imagine, he says, poor Jutka Szabó and her friend at the telephone exchange, they were victims, the professor will remember Jutka Szabó’—Mrs Harrer’s eyes filled with tears—‘them too. But people have died, says my husband, and then again I didn’t know if I myself was dead or alive, because apart from the post office this was the first I’d heard,’ she explained, ‘about the soldiers occupying the main buildings, and in the station, he said, they’d found a woman, imagine that, and yes, a child too, but then I couldn’t bear to listen to any more and asked him, how could you say you were defending us with that committee when such things were happening? to which he answers that if the committee didn’t exist, and especially the professor’s wife, who, at least this is what my husband said, was brave as a lion taking up the struggle, I mean if she weren’t there and she hadn’t succeeded in persuading two policemen to try to get through with a car then there would have been no army, and then maybe there’d have been more than two broken windows, four panes I tell him, and even more wounded and dead. Because the police, and my husband was really bitter about this, were nowhere to be found, they had melted away, that’s the way he put it, melted away and were nowhere to be found, except those two who then drove over to the county capital, and there was only one reason that all the police lost their heads, not exaggerating, lost their heads, my husband stressed with a significant look on his face. The chief of police, and here he drew out the long “ee” sound of “chief”, he hates him so much, I don’t know why, and has really hated him some two or three years, so much so that if his name comes up in conversation I hardly recognize him the hate is so strong in him, you wouldn’t believe it, since most people say he’s on good terms with him, though I don’t know the truth of that except he always denies it, in other words that the chief of police, the head of the squad as he put it, is in fact, he explained, the very head that the police have lost, and he grew so red in the face at this point, you could see how intensely he hated him. He was drunk, said my husband, he was so drunk he slept through the entire day, imagine that, the whole day, though they occasionally woke him but it was no use as he wasn’t up to anything, then some time in the early dawn he left the committee and everybody, including the professor’s wife apparently, thought he was off to do something, but no, the two policemen who brought the army back with them confessed they had seen the chief unconscious with drink, he must have got hold of some more drink, because as for the good of the public, as my husband put it, he couldn’t give a flying fart for it. Of course he drinks too, said my husband, but he wouldn’t do anything like that if it was a matter of the public good, he had enough self-discipline to see it through, as for the chief, and again he stretched the “ee” out, no, he gets drunk all over again, to say nothing of the fact that no one knows where to find him, as there were only those two policemen to say they had picked him up when he looked as though he was heading home. Me, I’m just lying down, listening to all these terrible things, but the worst was to come, all the destruction they carried out, all that laying waste, says my husband, and no one knows how many are injured and how many dead, and simply where people are, my husband shook his head he was so fed up with it, because, for example, once the army arrived and the tank was there in front of the church, once people ventured out into the streets again, then right here on the main road, professor, sir, right in front of Nadabán’s butcher’s shop, as he was coming home to reassure me, he met Mrs Virág, who looked just as devastated. She was looking for her neighbour, Mrs Virág told him, who had spent the whole night sitting at her window watching the terrible events, and who had asked her across, she being frightened all by herself, so then they sat at the window together, but, as Mrs Virág said, it would have been better for them not to be sitting there, because it was past midnight when another band of hooligans came down the main road, waving sticks and God knows what, beating to death the stray cats in their path, Mrs Virág told my husband. And apparently they suddenly saw, and my husband deliberately didn’t mention his name, Mrs Virág’s neighbour’s son, as he put it to be precise, but I didn’t suspect anything and that was exactly as my husband wanted it, for he didn’t want me being suspicious, that’s all he said and reached down beside the bed for the brandy bottle, but I told him, don’t you touch that bottle now, and asked him if he was sure it was Mrs Virág. And he answers, yes, Mrs Virág. I’m thinking furiously, but nothing occurs to me, and they’re looking out of the window, my husband goes on, and they can’t believe their eyes, because there is Mrs Virág’s neighbour’s son, there in the thick of the hooligans, you’ll never believe it, he says, don’t even try, you won’t guess, we’ve been harbouring a viper in our bosoms. And I’m just staring at him, still not getting it, who he means, so I ask him and he says the woman, said Mrs Virág, got so wound up she’d never seen anything like it, and she started shouting how she’d had enough, enough of her son, she couldn’t care less any more, he had done nothing but bring shame on her but no more, she could bear it no longer and she got her coat, said Mrs Virág, and there was nothing she could say to her’ (Mrs Harrer briefly registered Eszter’s dumb-founded expression) ‘she was off. I’ll drag him out of there by the hair if need be, she was screaming quite out of her mind, and Mrs Virág was really frightened, said my husband, as they stood in front of Nadabán’s shop, and she followed them and it was well past midnight and she still hasn’t returned, and heaven knows how many others have gone that way, sighed my husband. Then he left Mrs Virág and walked down the main road a little way, and the havoc, he said, sitting in a crumpled heap on the bed, as he turned down Jókai Street, which is where he bumped into the soldiers and naturally, he said, since it was us who invited the forces of order into town they didn’t even bother to check my papers but simply showed me the list with its ringed names and descriptions, because by that time they had interrogated the witnesses at the town hall, people who’d seen what had happened overnight, and the soldiers, my husband explained, were now divided into squadrons to keep the peace and seek out troublemakers, but the list they showed him in Jokai Street, says my husband, had only one or two names on it and the rest were descriptions as there wasn’t hardly anyone local on it, the rest were strangers and hooligans. And he’s just staring at this list and doesn’t want to believe the evidence of his eyes, like he didn’t want to believe Mrs Virág neither, and when the soldiers ask him if he recognizes anyone on the list he’s so scared he says he doesn’t although he does. In the meantime I’m lying on the bed as I hear his name and I don’t want to believe my ears, he’s gone mad, I think, but then he says there’s no time to waste as they’re out looking for him and the reason he’s come home was to put my mind at rest but that now I should get my clothes on and get over as fast as I can to the professor, since the two of them, him and the professor, owe him that much, but I keep looking at him wondering what he’s up to. I tell myself, I knew it, I knew what would come of him, I told them when he first appeared that we shouldn’t take him on, it’ll only mean trouble taking a fool on, but of course my husband wouldn’t listen to me, what’s the point, I thought, in taking on the local idiot, and for that money if you please, I’m not going anywhere, I’m n
ot moving a step from here, I say to him, but at the same time I’m getting off the bed and pulling my coat on like an idiot myself. Then we’re out of the house with all the glass in the entrance and my husband says he’s off to look for him but he’ll shortly have to go to the town hall because the professor’s wife had made him promise to be there by seven at the latest, oh, I see, I say, by seven I’ll have to be alone again, all by myself, but he goes on protesting that this is the way things have to be, after having distinguished himself he’s got to keep his word and all, and he does have influence now and they made him promise to be there by seven. I beg him this and that and by this time we have reached the junction of Jókai Street and the main road, but I might as well be talking to the wall, and he says he’ll go as far as the station then come back and I should go over to the professor in case there’s something I can do for him, and it’s pointless me telling myself this is no good, not one step further, I was confused and came here anyway, looking neither left nor right as if I’d been struck blind, so I forgot even to say hello at the gate so I don’t know what the professor must think of me. I mean, to break in on someone just as dawn’s breaking you’d think it wouldn’t be too much to say hello, but I didn’t even do that, but what’s to be done, professor, a person’s mind gets into muddle when everything is collapsing about them, what with the army being here,’ Mrs Harrer dropped her voice, ‘and that tank …’ Eszter sat immobile on the edge of the bed, looking, the woman felt, straight through her. He was like a pillar of salt, that’s how he seemed when she had finished, she told Harrer afterwards, when she got home about noon. Then all she could see was her employer leaping from the bed, rushing to the wardrobe, ripping his coat from its hanger, and it was like he was responsible for everything, he cast one persecuted, fugitive glance at her, then stormed out of the house without a word. For her part, she remained seated in the armchair, blinking with fear, and when she heard the gate slammed loudly and furiously behind him, gave a shudder, burst into tears again, then unfolded her handkerchief, blew her nose and looked round the drawing room. It was only then she noticed the boarded-up windows. She rose slowly, then, because she could in no way comprehend what the boards were doing there, she walked over to them, gazing at them appraisingly, her face long and drawn. She ran a hand down one of the boards, then, having convinced herself that it was real, she gave all the others a little tap and with a slight pout, like any expert in the field, turned her back on the four panes of glass and concluded with a bitter sigh, mumbling, ‘Those nails should have been hammered in from the outside not from inside facing out!’ She shuffled back to the stove, had a look at the fire and threw a few more bits of wood on it, then, giving a shake of her head, turned off the light, took a last glance at the dark drawing room, and repeated, ‘Not in, but out …’