The Melancholy of Resistance (20 page)

‘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, ‘Anyone 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.