The Melancholy of Resistance

by Krasznahorkai, László

  Not simply out of this ruined spot, to which their attention had clearly been called by the missing awnings beside the unusual sign, ortopéd, but back to ‘the innermost depths of hell from which you’ve emerged’, said the man in the corner, his eyes fixed in front of him, although the mouth swollen from beatings kept repeating the words, ‘Scram’ and ‘Out of here’ and ‘Hop to’, while they, as if it were precisely these bitter last words which signalled the end, paid not even the slightest attention to the petrified shoemaker, but stopped there in the wrecked workshop with precisely that sense of unspoken unity with which they had forced their way in, and simply abandoned their activities, left the upended cupboards full of leather, crossed the floor strewn with urine-soaked surgical shoes, slippers and boots, and were, every one of them, out in the street again. Though they were in no position to see it, they sensed from the memory of their mass dispersal, that the others—divided into groups of roughly similar size—were all there in the pitch darkness, not one of them missing, and, if anything, it was this knowledge that had instinctively prepared them for independent action that governed their progress on the march of destruction, for their cumulative fury dictated neither their targets nor their direction, merely that whatever act of wickedness they had committed they should trump it with an ever greater one—as now, when, having finished with the maker of surgical boots, their passions amenable to command yet unfettered by it, they set out to find the next appropriate target (not yet suspecting it would be their last), proceeding down the chestnut-tree-lined road into the town centre. The cinema was still on fire and in the scarlet light of the flames that occasionally shot up, three groups were seen hanging about the pavement, still as statues, watching the fire with a look of disgust, but, just as would happen later in the square when their companions met with a noticeably larger crowd by the now burning chapel, the way they came upon them enabled them to maintain their rate of progress during whatever remained of their terrifying unfinished expedition, ensuring that their otherwise slow but menacing pace should chime in with the even tempo of the march, which had been previously maintained from the cinema through to the entrance of the square and thence to the deserted silence of St Stephen’s Street behind the place of worship. Not a single word passed between them now, only the odd match flared briefly with the answering glow of the lit cigarette, their eyes being fixed on the back of the man in front or on the pavement as they moved almost unconsciously in step with the others in the freezing cold, and since they were well past the point at which they started, when they themselves had been frightened, smashing whole rows of windows if only that they should be able to see what was behind them, they left things untouched until they reached the nearest corner, when, bypassing the block which had first attracted their attention, they found the blue-enamel-covered iron gate that opened on the icy weed-infested park and a pair of darkened buildings within. Using their iron bars, a few blows were enough to smash the lock and devastate the porter’s lodge from which the porter had long fled, but having cut across one of the available paths they found it a much harder task breaking into the first house, because there, having prevailed upon the outer gate, they found themselves faced with two further doors which the inhabitants—having no doubt heard the news from the town and fearing the worst, in other words expecting precisely such an attack—had not only locked with the appropriate keys and bolted as far as possible, but barricaded with tables and chairs piled on top of each other, as if suspecting that they would have to do everything they could to resist the approaching power, with somewhat limited success, as the detachment even now swarming up the stairs demonstrated. The heated corridor that ran down the length of the raised ground floor was pitch dark and the night nurse, who, having heard the racket and was in these last moments attempting to escape by the back door along with those of her assistants who were still mobile, had switched off even the small night-lights in the various wards in the strange hope that by barricading the doors and turning off the lights she was ensuring the safety of her charges, if only because despite every instinct to the contrary no one really wanted to believe that the evil set loose in the street would take the form of a treacherous attack upon the hospital. But that it did, and it was as if it were precisely their silence that betrayed them, for once the last doors had been forced open and the light switches located in the corridor, those sheltering under their blankets in the first wards on the right were the first to be found and tipped out of their beds, but since at this point the mob had finally run out of ideas no one knew what to do with those writhing piteously on the floor: they felt a cramp in their arms as they went to touch them, there wasn’t strength enough in their legs to kick out at them, and so, as if to demonstrate that their destructive power was no longer capable of locating a target, their actual acts of destruction grew ever more ridiculous and their helplessness ever more patently clear. Because ultimately they wanted to distance themselves from what they had come to do, they merely swept through and passed on, tearing the sockets out of the wall and smashing against the same wall whatever instruments happened to be ticking or buzzing or glimmering, going on to throw whatever medication happened to be in the lockers on to the floor and stamping on bottles, thermometers and even the most innocuous items of personal possession, following this with the general destruction of glasses-cases, family photographs, and even the rotting remnants of fruit left in paper bags; now dividing into smaller units, now coming together again, they advanced in tides, but rather disorientated at meeting a completely unarmed victim, not understanding that the dumb fear, the utter lack of resistance which allowed that victim to bear this onslaught, was increasingly robbing them of power and that, faced by this sapping mire of unconditional surrender—though this is what had hitherto given them the greatest, most bitter pleasure—they would have to retreat. They stood under the flickering neon lights of the corridor at the very limits of silence (the distant screaming of the nurses was faintly audible behind closed doors) then, instead of seizing upon their prey again in fury and confusion or continuing their ravages on the upper floors, they waited for the last of their group to rejoin them then staggered out of the building like some ragtag army, all discipline lost, working their way back across the park to the iron gates to hesitate there for long minutes in the first clear indication of their lost momentum and indecisiveness, and if they no longer had any idea of where they should go or why, it was because, unbearable as it was to recognize and admit the fact that their infernal mission, like that of the exhausted detachments in front of the cinema and the chapel, had come up short, they had simply run out of murderous energy. The knowledge that they had made a crude rush at things and failed in their mission, the mission they had undertaken at a single gesture from their leader, to wipe out everything, suddenly imposed an intolerable weight on them, and when, after a period of confused meditation, they finally left the hospital gates, it was obvious that the possibility of the whole enterprise, including all their merciless acts of havoc and destruction, being senseless, so disorientated them that not only had their steps lost their previously uniform brisk tempo but their very esprit de corps was itself damaged in some way; the lethally disciplined squadron had become a pitiful rabble, the cohesive force of uncontrollable disgust had vanished to leave behind some twenty to thirty crumpled, introspective individuals who half suspected, half knew, but did not care what was to happen next because they had entered some empty, infinitely empty, terrain which not only had trapped them but was preventing them even forming the desire to escape. They smashed up one more shop (the sign above it said AUNDR OWROOM), but even as they were tearing off the grille and breaking the door open their every movement showed that they were embarking not on a new wave of destruction but on a retreat: it was as if each of them had been struck by a fatal bullet and, half collapsing, was seeking some last place of refuge where his miserable agony might be ended, and indeed, once having crossed the threshold, turned on the light and surveyed the place, packed
as it was with washing machines—the premises reminded them more of a factory than a shop—there remained nothing in their eyes of that earlier ruthless look; having fallen prisoner to their own actions, locked into their own refuge, they felt it didn’t really matter where they were and for a long time listened expressionlessly to the creaking of the door they had left swinging behind them, only moving away from the entrance once its arresting siren song had died away in the freezing blank-faced showroom. One of them, as if suddenly coming to consciousness in the general nausea or recognizing for the first time the gravity of the situation afflicting his companions, curled his lip contemptuously, turned on his heels and, hissing something (‘… Shitheads! …’) behind him, loudly stamped his way out into the street again in an attempt to register some kind of protest, asserting his right to surrender, if surrender was called for, as an individual; another began hitting one of the machines ranged before them in precise and anonymous military order with an iron bar, then, seeking out its most sensitive points, succeeded in tearing the motor from its broken plastic casing and smashed the part into flying smithereens; the others, though, no longer registering the actions of the first two, did not touch anything but set uncertainly out along one of the narrow corridors formed by the ranks of machines and, wanting to put as much distance between themselves and anyone else, lay down on the lino-covered floor. To locate a sufficient distance, or to disperse in this forest of washing machines to the degree that they lost sight of one another—though this was what they most desired—was well nigh impossible, except for a few of them, but this minority certainly did not include Valuska, who, in any case—though this was no longer of any significance—took it for granted that that was the reason people remained close to him, and why, for example, the person sitting up, two rows away, looking in front of him with a sour expression, was busily scribbling in a little book, for, after all, someone had to note that the most ruthless of them all, his terrifying custodian, who had just departed having left behind him the memory of his bulk, his hat, his broadcloth coat and boots, not to mention his liberated victim, might himself, for all they knew, ‘have recovered himself’. It was all the same to Valuska whatever they intended to do with him; whether they decided to finish him off there and then or later was of no interest to him, for there was no fear left in him, nor did he try to escape, since the discovery that he had no desire to escape from whatever power inhabited this murderous and healing night was enough to make escape impossible; he might very well have escaped a particular group, for there were many opportunities to do that, but not the terrible burden they carried, from that there was to be no escape ever again—in so far as such a burden was perceptible to a person so utterly blinded in the first shocking and decisive moment of his complete rebirth. Because the awful helplessness he felt in front of Mr Eszter’s house when—prior to his later enlightenment—his friend in the market square rescued him, put his arm about him and they marched off down the main road ‘with the scrape and shuffle of boots and leggings’, and some hundred or so yards further down, at some literally silent word of command, began their assault upon the houses; and the terror he felt when he picked up their desperate momentum, when he might have rushed to the forefront, feeling the powerful grip of the comradely hand on his shoulder which every so often, as if by way of warning, tightened its grip and practically held him back; this helplessness and sheer terror at the dilemma he faced when, on the one hand, he wished to defend the person being beaten and, on the other, to be the person administering the beating, precluded either resistance or escape, nor did it allow him to suspect that from all those decades, from that entire forest of illusions, it should have been the one considered most irredeemably stupid, that is to say he himself, that this infernal night should so mercilessly have chosen. Valuska no longer knew where they were going, he registered only the beating down of another door, and, for the first time since they started, they had begun breaking all the windows and smashing the lights above the gateways, eventually pushing their way into one of the houses. With his apparently evil escort at his side, an escort who propelled him along with a justifiably relentless pleasure, he was swept with the mob into a little building where things began to happen in extraordinarily slow motion: even the sounds were slow as an old woman stepped in front of them, shouting, and a couple moved towards her with expressions of unbearable indifference on their distorted faces. He could still see the fist of one of them swinging in a relaxed fashion while the woman tried to back away but failed to move an inch—he could still see this—then, with a superhuman effort, as if every movement entailed the shifting of an enormous weight, he turned his head away and fixed his eyes on a corner of the terminally silent room. And there was nothing in that corner except a vague rolling shadow which slowly settled where the rotting floorboards entered the sharp angle of the wall which had none of the usual furniture to cover it, no bed, no wardrobe, quite bare with a sour smell—only the corner of a room could look so empty and smell so sour, and yet to Valuska’s eyes it was stuffed full of horrors, as if whatever happened or might have happened had soaked into it: it was like staring into the eyes of a leering monster he didn’t until then realize existed at all. Nor could he withdraw his gaze from it: however he was shoved about the room his eyes remained fixed there and saw nothing but that corner in the sharpest detail with its unmoving shadow which resembled nothing so much as a squatting dwarf that had been generated out of darkness and thick vapour; it blinded him, it burned into his consciousness, it held his eyes as if on a tight chain, and it didn’t matter now that they were leaving, he dragged it around with him wherever they went … He moved forward with them when they moved, he stopped when they stopped, but he was unconscious of all this, as he was of anything he did or that was done to him, and he remained in that state for a long long time, crushed by the weight of silence that had fallen on him, whatever racket they were making up ahead or immediately at hand. For hours, hours that could not be measured in terms of minutes or centuries, he dragged this terrible image round with him and was wholly oblivious to everything he suffered and by now he could not tell what was stronger, the chains with which it bound him or his own agonized desperation as he clung on to it. At one moment someone seemed to be lifting him off the ground, but the inappropriate power the other expended on this operation unbalanced him: ‘What makes him so light?’ the other muttered angrily and let him down again or rather shoved him furiously aside; then, much later, he thought he was lying on the pavement and they were pouring rough spirits into his mouth and this made him stand up again, and once more there was the hand on his shoulder or under his arm, the hand which presumably had more than once prevented him running away and which now powerfully gripped him and needlessly maintained its grip, for even if he had no idea that he might wake to his present state, the burden of the image he carried with him, the blank significance of the corner of that room, still exerted its influence: that was all he saw wherever he was tossed or pushed or swept, anything else simply flashed before him as they passed—a figure running, fire blazing, all in a mist. It was impossible, however he tried, to free himself of it, because as soon as he forgot it he remembered it again, and it made no difference where he was, in one place or another, he remained slave to the numbing power of its attraction—then, suddenly, a deathly fatigue overtook him, his half-frozen toes began to ache in his icy boots, he wanted to lie down on the pavement (had he done so before?) but the man in the broadcloth coat—Valuska could not quite see him as a tutelary presence yet—scratched his unshaven chin and offered some mocking reproof. These were the first words that penetrated his consciousness and the not unmerited derision in the voice (‘What’s up, half-wit, you want more brandy?’) reminded him where he was and whom he was with, and, as if that terrible corner with its timelessly sour smell had turned into a theatre-set with nightmarish lighting, accommodating the whole of this horrific night, he took in, for the first time, the fearsome, distorted features of his ‘teacher�
�. No, it wasn’t brandy he wanted, if he wanted anything at all, but sleep; he wanted to fall asleep and freeze to death on the pavement so he shouldn’t have to understand the experience that had begun to assume clearer contours in his mind, he just wanted it all to end, nothing more; fortunately, the manner and tone of the question left him in no doubt that he should promptly forget this idea, and, assuming that the question had somehow addressed his true desires, he shook his head violently, got up and, giving an involuntary shudder as he felt his companion laying his hand on his shoulder again, fell into step and obediently marched beside him. And he examined this face with the darkly blinding corner behind him; he noted its hawk-like nose, the thick stubble on its chin, the inflamed eyelids, the heavily abraded skin under its left cheekbone, and the frightening and complex thing wasn’t that he couldn’t sound the infinitely deep well of fury in it, but the resemblance it bore to the face he met yesterday in the market square; he had to understand that the man to whom his sudden and unforeseen attack of anxiety had led him in Kossuth Square, after his parting from Mr Eszter, was most certainly identical with the one who acted as his conductor in this carnival of hatred, and who now functioned—perhaps wholly involuntarily—as a surgeon mercilessly cutting his whole life open; there was nothing to disguise the fact that those frightening features were those of the man who was there the day before and the day before that, and so on, down to some wholly innocent original face; and that it was the cumulative effect of all of these faces, haunting, cold but wearing an entirely human expression that was practically aglow with the blinding certainty of its absolute power which promised new and supremely inventive forms of ruthlessness; that it was he who was directing each and every movement of this irresistible march, including Valuska’s own trials and tribulations as he stumbled down the desperate stations of complete collapse, though something in his manner suggested that the brutally instructive drama he unfolded before Valuska, while dragging him along by the arm, was in some way intended to serve as a form of cure, a cure that entailed a certain amount of necessary suffering (no gain without pain), and that this was a situation he was clearly enjoying. Valuska stared at that face, and as he examined it he began to understand that the ‘hauntingly cold’ expression he found on it was growing ever less enigmatic, since the ruthless mask might only be the unforgiving mirror of something that he, in his thirty-five years of muddle and sickliness, had perhaps been incapable of seeing, thought Valuska, but immediately modified that ‘perhaps’ to ‘no, absolutely certainly’, so that he should not leave unrecorded the decisive moment when he finally woke from his protracted slumber and stumbled on his own long-lost identity. The dumb silence broke, the blinding light behind his captor went out together with its unmoving shadow, and a little space, a park, came into focus as he looked around, a park and a path, then a set of iron gates, and he no longer felt any astonishment that it should be him alone, with his unforgivable blindness, and not the crowd gathered at the hospital, who was the alien creature here. Nothing of that astonishment remained, there was not the faintest necessity for flight, since the emptiness that had shuddered through him in those first few minutes had annihilated him too: pieces of him were rolling away for ever in all directions; he had disappeared in a single flash, had been reduced to nothing, so that the only thing he was aware of now was the hot, bitter taste of reality on his palate and an aching in his legs, particularly the left one. The unearthly fog, which in Wenckheim Avenue had presented these ugly functionaries of darkness as the unlikely creatures of a destructive yet magnetic power, lifted, and now, as he looked at them with new, suddenly acquired clarity of vision, and recalled them as they had been in their assembled hundreds, it seemed quite obvious to him that there wasn’t, nor had there ever been, anything otherworldly or alien about them, that they, and not only they but their ‘destructive and magnetic’ leader, had lost their ‘demonic’ quality; in fact, now the scales, which had grown ever larger, ever darker with years of looking at things the wrong way, had fallen from his eyes for ever, he knew himself disillusioned, free of the false comforts to which his dimwittedness had deservedly condemned him by hiding ‘the true nature of reality’ from him. His awakening was swift, rending, very much the proverbial bolt from the blue: the man he thought he was no longer existed, so, when, after a long period of indecision, the group that had adopted him left its post at the hospital gates and houses, telegraph poles and each and every paving stone had settled back into its old position, he understood as something perfectly self-evident that his mind, ‘a mind that desired to restock itself’, which no longer made panicky lists but was preparing to take a steady, indifferent view of things, could not help but regard the pillars that supported the contemporary world as anything but broken columns. Mornings and afternoons, evenings and nights, had collapsed into each other, and forces he had, until yesterday, imagined as existing in some eternal equilibrium—silent as the perfect machine, functioning delicately out of sight—now assumed a barren, crude, cold and peculiarly repulsive, albeit sobering and absolutely clear, aspect: the home he had so naively loved, that house in the garden, had lost every last vestige of whatever cheap magic it had held for him; now, when he turned his mind to it for one last indifferent moment, nothing seemed to remain except a set of rotting walls and a bulging uneven ceiling—a laundry room that belonged not to him but to Harrer; no path led to it now, nor did any road lead anywhere else, for as far as the ‘moonstruck wanderer’ was concerned, every gap, every opening, every door had been walled up if only so that he, the now convalescent patient, should find ‘the terrifyingly real entrances into the heart of the world’ ever more readily. He trudged in thick darkness among the donkey-jackets and greasy macs, staring at the pavement under his feet and thinking of the Peafeffer, the depot and the Komló, aware that these were inaccessible to him, that all the streets, all the squares, each bend and corner, had somehow dissolved and broken up, though at the same time he could see the old route of what had been his serpentine meanderings ever more sharply, more completely, as if on a map, but since the landscape underlying the map had disappeared and he felt unable to take a single step in that which had taken its place, not at least the way he used to do, he thought it best to forget whatever had preceded this bleak unfamiliar town at which he had arrived like a newborn child, somewhat unsteady on his feet, it might have been yesterday … or before … or whenever it was. He’d forget the mornings: the taste of half-remembered dreams, the slow awakenings, the tea steaming in the polka-dot-patterned cup before he left the house; he’d forget the dawn spreading over the railway and the smell of newsprint at the depot in the faint blue haze, the post-boxes he passed from seven in the morning to about an hour before noon, all the doors, window-sills and letter-boxes in gateways, and the hundred different movements which ensured that, day by day, all the magazines should arrive at the doors, window-sills, letterboxes and bins—in two places under the threshold doormats—of the appropriate subscribers. And he would wipe from memory the question he would religiously address to Mrs Harrer about whether it was noon yet and time for him to start, and the clanking of the pots in Mr Eszter’s kitchen and the long line waiting for the cook at the Komló; he’d let the house in Wenckheim Avenue collapse about its owner’s ears, forget the gate, the hallway, the cautious knocking, let Bach and the piano finally go to hell and allow the dim light of the sitting room to fade into the darkness for ever. He’d not give another thought to Mr Hagelmayer, nor would he demonstrate the eclipse of the sun to anyone ever again; he’d not bring to mind that counter, or the cheap glasses, or the cloud of smoke drifting above waves of muttered conversation, and on no account would he set out at closing time for the water-tower … He drifted along with the others to the ‘scrape and shuffle of boots and leggings’ and once the enfeebled group had crossed the Körös Canal and reached the fence of his mother’s house in Maróthy Square, neither the sudden appearance of his mother’s terrified face, nor her voice sliding down the intercom at
the gate, meant anything to him, and the house itself with its yard, its bare trees, and the two and a half rented rooms hidden behind them, meant even less, so much less that he simply turned his head away. He didn’t want to see it, nor any of his earlier haunts, but even as he was following one step behind his fearsome master, his valedictory survey of the past was brought to an abrupt end, for here, in Maróthy Square, contrary to all his expectations, he was overwhelmed by a sudden feeling that, should he persist with it, a treacherous sense of bitterness would utterly floor him; some dangerous, mysterious, intense pain that, while denying the complexity of the specific operation, was likely to suggest that any truly ‘objective assessment’ was a deeply risky enterprise. He rejected the idea that confronting this ‘dangerous, mysterious intense pain’ head-on should entail deliberately ‘forgetting’ anything and thought the likelihood of that danger extraordinarily remote, for he, ‘who could overcome false illusions’, he, of whom no one would have expected such stern resolution, he, who was no longer daunted by any thought of pain or danger, was the surest guarantee of that: he had taken his dreadful lessons to heart and could now declare himself to be ‘just like the others’. If he weren’t so mortally tired he would have liked nothing better than to announce to the others that they should rest assured as far as he was concerned for his ‘heart’ was ‘dead’ and it was pointless mocking him now that he ‘had learned to stand on his own two feet and understood everything’: he no longer believed the world was ‘an enchanted place’ for the only power that really existed was ‘that declared by force of arms’; and while he couldn’t deny that they had terrified him at first, he now felt himself capable of adjusting to their ways and was ‘grateful for the privilege of being offered a glance into their lives’. So he went on with them, past Maróthy Square, waiting patiently until he should recover his strength and could explain to them how naïve and childlike his assumptions had been, consoling himself with the illusion that, though the cosmos was vast and the earth merely a tiny speck within it, the force that drove that cosmos was, ultimately, joy: joy that ‘from the dawn of time had saturated every planet, every star’, and that they should regard him as one who had assumed that all this was good and that, furthermore, it had some secret core, a central point, not precisely a meaning but some kind of substance or mass, lighter, more delicate than a single breath, whose unforgettable radiance could not reasonably be denied and could be ignored only by those who failed to look. If only his terrible exhaustion had faded with his obsessions, for he also wanted to tell them that after what, for him, had naturally been a terrible night, he had completely sobered up. You should imagine me, he would say, as a man who has lived his entire life with his eyes closed, and when I opened them, those millions of stars and planets, that universe of delight, simply disappeared. I saw the hospital gates, the houses, the trees on either side and you all around me, and I knew at once that everything that really existed had found its place in me. I looked between the roofs at the barely visible horizon and not only had that secret universe disappeared, but I had too, as had the best part of thirty years of constantly thinking about it; wherever I turned my head I saw nothing, everything had taken on its true shape. It was like in the cinema ‘when they turn the lights on’. This is what he would have said, and also that he felt like someone who had moved from the infinitely large compass of a ‘giant globe’ into a bare, lowland sheepfold that frightened him at first; from a diseased but playful dream to an awakening in the desert where nothing beyond the immediately tangible possessed any reality and where no element of the landscape was capable of transcending itself, because, as he would have added, he had finally realized that nothing, apart from the earth and the objects disposed across its crust, actually existed, while, on the other hand, anything that did exist in such a manner was of an extraordinary weight, imbued with extraordinary power and a meaning that collapsed in on itself, which required no validation by any outside power. He’d have asked them to believe him, for now, like them, he knew there was ‘neither heaven nor hell’, since one could not call into the balance anything but that which actually existed; that it was only Evil that required an explanation, not Good, and that therefore there was ‘neither good nor evil’, and that there was one law and one law only, that of the strong which dictated that ‘the stronger power was absolute’. You couldn’t, in fact you didn’t need to, conclude anything from this, not even that ‘a man who was a slave to his feelings was one who had everything to lose’; not at all, he would have explained, because, for the first time, he was no longer aware of any functioning feeling himself; he just needed a little time—not deferral, simply time—until the diseased brain in his head began to work in a normal manner, because at the moment it could only pound and drum and hammer and was incapable of doing what it should do; as, for example, resolve why, if the whole shebang was so firmly set in stone, did everything that should have been self-evident seem so puzzling, and why things that should have been clear and final lost their outlines; in other words, how could the night and everything that had happened in it seem so clear yet obscure at the same time … By the time he had reached this point in his reflections they were no longer marching along the main road and had entered Mr Sajbók’s showroom and were sitting among the washing machines in the Keravill store, but because of ‘the stressful mental overtime’ he had been doing, he had no idea how long they had been in there. His guardian had disappeared some time ago and the man who replaced him was on the last pages of his notebook, so he estimated that at least an hour must have passed; then, once he had decided that ‘it didn’t really matter much’, he went back to what he was doing before he had woken from his dream, which was rubbing his frozen feet. Throwing off his boots and leaning against the nearest washing machine for support, he sat there like someone who had decided to move in for good and take his place among the machines in the low hall. He watched the man with the notebook for some time, then, pulling his boots back on, tied up the laces, and, because he felt it might be dangerous, he tried every way he knew to prevent himself falling asleep in an unguarded moment. No, he encouraged himself, he would most certainly not fall asleep, the grinding exhaustion in his limbs would come to an end, and the pounding in his head would eventually stop, so he might be able to speak again, for he absolutely had to speak to the others and tell them that if he had listened to those who controlled his fate he would not have been here with his head pounding but beyond all this, full of self-confidence, all he had to do was accept the good advice that had been showered on him. He’d mention his mother, who apart from constantly scolding him had, by way of warning (a useless warning as it happened), cast him out for ever, and who even the night before had warned him that unless he adopted a normal way of life she would grab him by the hair and shake him until he was prepared to understand ‘the way things were’ in her view, and, of course, Mrs Eszter too, whose example he so stupidly failed to follow, who wasn’t what he had thought her to be but someone hard, smart and ruthless who crushed everyone who stood in her way; for it was the first time he had seen her so clearly and understood at last the significance of the police chief, the booming voice and the suitcase; he also understood that he should not have crumbled as he did, but learned from her, yesterday, in her room in Honvéd Passage for example, when she overcame the opposition of the committee and more or less cleared the way for the crowd in the market square. But, most importantly, he had to tell them about Mr Eszter, who, with infinite patience, had for years been telling him that what he saw did not exist and that all he thought was false, for he had been stupid enough not to believe him, imagining him to be the victim of some great consuming error, whereas it had been he himself who was the victim; he had to talk about him, the most outstanding figure among them, Mr Eszter, who saw things more clearly than anyone: it was indeed no wonder that the sad weight of his knowledge should have resulted in such an unfortunate illness. How often had Valuska sat in the armchair listening to him saying things like, ‘A
nyone who believes that the world is maintained through the grace of some force for good or beauty, dear friend, is doomed to early disillusion’; not a day went by but Mr Eszter instructed him, ‘Look at me! I am the result of not learning from experience. Like everyone else,’ but he had understood nothing of this, being blind and deaf, and quite unable to hear the words of warning, so now, when he reflected on the years they had spent together, he was astonished that he hadn’t got bored with his own constant mutterings about light, space and ‘the enchanting mechanism of the cosmos’. On the other hand, he thought, if his old master could see him now (or rather a few moments later, once his strength had returned) he would certainly be surprised to find that the extraordinary amount of time he had spent on Valuska’s instruction, all those hundreds of homilies, had not been entirely wasted since he could see for himself that his pupil now regarded the world exclusively in terms of ‘what he had learned in the drawing room’. When precisely Mr Eszter would have a chance to see all this he had no idea, since, for him, nothing now remained of the house in Wenckheim Avenue, for he belonged here for good now: yes, that was all settled, Valuska nodded (‘It has been decided …’), rubbing his inflamed eyes and propping his feet on the washing machine facing him, for he suddenly felt as if the ice-cold floor beneath him had begun to slope steeply away. By this time he was only vaguely aware of someone going up to his new guardian, taking his notebook, turning a few pages and asking, ‘What is this?’ to which his keeper mumbled, ‘God knows … your last will and testament …’ then they grinned at each other … the other threw the notebook away … he heard the words, ‘crisp and brilliant’ … something about ‘sharp frost …’ and, last of all, ‘Stop scribbling, clever dick.’ That was the last because, by now, the ice-cold floor was tilting so much that he had begun to slide down it, slipping and rolling over, until he fell into a bottomless pit and continued falling for an extraordinary length of time, flopping helplessly, until, finally, he touched solid ground and found himself on the ice-cold floor again, at which point he opened his eyes. He was no longer propped against a washing machine but lying beside it on the lino, curled up tight as a hedgehog, so cold that his every sinew was trembling, and what was difficult to understand was not so much that the floor was not really sloping but that his own exhaustion had made him feel as though it was, nor that he hadn’t really fallen headlong but had simply fallen asleep; no, what was really difficult to understand, once he had fearfully dragged himself upright again, was that he was in Mr Sajbók’s showroom and alone. He ran hither and thither, up and down endless rows of washing machines, but was soon forced to admit that there was no mistake: they had gone and left him behind, he was really and truly on his own; but he couldn’t understand how it had happened, and found himself asking aloud, ‘What now?’ his voice echoing in the empty hall; then, slowing down so as to calm himself, he forced himself to go at walking pace, and after a few minutes of this, he did actually feel much calmer. Because, he reasoned, nothing could change the fact that he was one of them now, even if they didn’t happen to be here, the bond between them being unbreakable; and so, he decided, he would rest a little until they returned and go over and over in his mind everything he had learned from them until he understood it better. He therefore returned to ‘his own’ washing machine, leaned back against it again, stretched out his legs and was just about to settle to some serious thinking when, a couple of metres from him on the floor, not far from the spot where his new keeper had sat, he noticed a familiar object. He knew immediately that it was the discarded notebook and thinking of this he felt a sudden flush of excitement, for he couldn’t imagine that its owner and author would have simply abandoned the book to its fate, as something not worth keeping, but was sure that he had deliberately left it for him to read. He walked over to it, picked it up, smoothed out the crumpled pages, returned to his place and, resting it on his lap, surveyed the spiky scrawl, and, once started, forgot everything else but read through it with alert and grave attention.