The Melancholy of Resistance (26 page)

they ran out of time for the leader of the aforementioned regular forces reached them and bellowed at them with a clarity that even Mr Mádai could understand: ‘Enough of this, you blasted fools! How long, do you think,’ he bent over the retreating and terrified figure of Mr Nadabán, ‘can I bear to put up with this claptrap! Who are you to play havoc with my patience! Ever since dawn I have had to listen to nothing but retarded babble, and you think you can carry on like this with impunity?! To me, who the day before yesterday in Telekgerendas locked every shithead fool up in the asylum?! You think I’ll make an exception of you?! Don’t delude yourselves, I’ll have the whole stinking place behind bars, this filthy hole where every godforsaken idiot behaves as if he were the centre and keeper of the universe, God blast him! Catastrophe! Of course! Last judgement! Horseshit! It’s you that are the catastrophe, you’re the bloody last judgement, your feet don’t even touch the ground, you bunch of sleepwalkers. I wish you were dead, the lot of you. Let’s make a bet,’ and here he shook Nadabán by the shoulders, ‘that you don’t even know what I’m talking about!! Because you don’t
talk,
you “whisper” or “expostulate”; you don’t
walk
down the street but “proceed feverishly”; you don’t
enter
a place but “cross its threshold”, you don’t feel
cold
or
hot,
but “find yourselves shivering” or “feeling the sweat pour down you”! I haven’t heard a straight word for hours, you can only mew and caterwaul; because if a hooligan throws a brick through your window you invoke the last judgement, because your brains are addled and filled up with steam, because if someone sticks your nose in shit all you do is sniff, stare and cry “sorcery!” What would really be sorcery, you degenerates, is if someone were to wake you up and you realized that you lived not on the moon but in Hungary, with north at the top and south at the bottom, in a place where Monday is the first day of the week and January the first month of the year! You haven’t the faintest notion of anything, you couldn’t tell a trench mortar from three stacks of air-rifles but go wittering on about “the cataclysm that signals the end of the world”, or some other garbage, and think I have nothing better to do than tramp the roads between Csongrád and Vesztö with two hundred professional soldiers to defend you from a bunch of yobs!!! Look at this specimen,’ said he to the lieutenant, indicating Mr Volent, then pushing his face right into that of his victim. ‘What year is this, eh?! What is the name of the prime minister?! Is the Danube navigable?! Look at him,’ he looked round to the lieutenant, ‘he hasn’t a clue! And they’re all like him, the whole lousy town, this whole leper colony is full of them! Géza, my boy,’ he called, his voice turning indifferent and bitter, ‘drag the circus truck out to the station, pass the matter over to the military tribunal, leave four or five detachments in the square and get rid of these delicate souls, because I just … I just want to be through with it!!!’ The three worthies stood before him as if a bolt from hell had scored a direct hit on them, not breathing, unable to speak a word, and when the colonel turned away they were incapable of moving a muscle; under the circumstances it wasn’t too hard to see that without some outside help none of them could understand what they should do, so the lieutenant pointed decisively at the door and ushered them out of it double quick as if that was all the help they needed and they would somehow make their way home by themselves. Not Eszter though, whose hopes of a favourable hearing had been dashed by the colonel’s unexpected outburst; he didn’t know what to do, to stand or sit, to stay or go. He remained indifferent to anything except the best way of exonerating Valuska, but after all that had happened even a crisp, precise formulation seemed singularly unpromising, so he sat there like someone about to get up and watched as the thick-set, red-faced colonel pulled at his military moustache and, with his exhausted lieutenant in tow, retreated in a huff to the corner where Mrs Eszter stood waiting. There was not a crease in his uniform in that vast hall, and his whole being seemed somehow ironed out, both without and within; his decisive stride, his ramrod-straight back, his obscene but direct manner of speaking combined to produce this effect, this ideal, and he was satisfied with the result as was patently clear from the sound of his voice, that crackling, snappish instrument made to command, with which he now addressed Mrs Eszter. ‘Tell me, madam, how a practical sober woman like you could stand this year after year?’ The question required no answer but you could see that Mrs Eszter, who raised her eyes to the ceiling as if contemplating one, did after all want to say something, something that was fated not to be said because the colonel at this point happened to glance in the direction of the far wall and saw that one of the witnesses had in scandalous fashion succeeded in remaining there, and, with clouded brow, he bellowed at his lieutenant: ‘I told you to get rid of everyone!’ ‘I’d like to make a statement concerning János Valuska,’ said Eszter, rising from his seat, and seeing that the colonel had turned away and crossed his arms, condensed all he had to say in a single sentence, stating quietly: ‘He is wholly innocent.’ ‘What do we know about him?’ the colonel barked impatiently. ‘Was he one of them?’ ‘According to the unanimous testimony of the witnesses, he was,’ the lieutenant answered. ‘He’s still at liberty.’ ‘Military tribunal for him then!’ the colonel retorted, but before he could regard the matter as finished and continue his conversation, Mrs Eszter cut in. ‘Allow me to make a brief comment, colonel.’ ‘My dear lady, you know that you are the only person in this place whose voice I am happy to hear. Excepting my own, of course,’ he added with the most fleeting of smiles to acknowledge the joke, but joined in the loud and raucous laughter that followed and echoed round the walls, as if to signify the company’s astonishment that he, who was the complete master of the situation, should be so eminently capable of dazzling them with not only his self-control but—remarkably—his wit. ‘The person in question,’ said Mrs Eszter, once the laughter had died away, ‘is not accountable’. ‘What do you mean, madam?’ ‘I mean he is mentally deficient.’ ‘In that case,’ the colonel shrugged, ‘I’ll lock him up in the asylum. At least there’s someone I can lock up …’ he added, twirling his moustache with a suppressed smile, thereby alerting the company to the irresistible punchline of another marvellous joke, ‘… though the whole town belongs in the loony-bin …’ Laughter was certain to erupt at this point, and so it did, and as Eszter gazed at them, particularly noting his wife, who had not cast a glance at him, he understood that everything had been decided, that he had no means of persuading the humorous company to a more appropriate evaluation of the facts, so the best thing for him to do was to leave the room and go home. ‘Valuska is alive, that is all that matters …’ he thought and stepped through the door, cutting through the group of locals and military hanging about the entrance, descending the stairs with the fading echo of Mrs Eszter’s and the colonel’s competing gales of laughter in his ears, making his way down the ringing ground-floor corridors of the town hall, and, when he reached the street, trusting to his instinct and automatically turned right towards Árpád Street, so lost in his own thoughts that he didn’t hear when one of the bystanders at the gate, one who had succeeded in overcoming his horror at seeing the picturesque delights of the town in such a ruinous condition, greeted him faintly: ‘Good day, professor, sir …’ Nothing matters, thought Eszter, and probably because he had worn his coat throughout the interrogations in the warm hall started to shiver halfway down Árpád Street. Nothing, he kept saying to himself as he walked, even once he had arrived at his home in Wenckheim Avenue, more by blind instinct and chance than calculation. He opened the gate, shut it after him and fished his key from his pocket, but it seemed that Mrs Harrer, no doubt by design, having taken some thought, had left the door open, and so he put the key back in his pocket, pushed the door open, proceeded down the hall between the rows of bookcases, and, keeping his coat on so he should warm up a bit, settled down on the bed in the drawing room. Then he got up, went back out into the hall, paused a moment in front of one of the bookcases, tilting his head to examine the titles, then went into the kitchen and adjusted a glass by the sink so it shouldn’t be carelessly knocked over. But then he decided not to keep his coat on, so he took it off, took a clothes brush and carefully dusted it down, and once he had finished returned to the drawing room with it, opened the wardrobe, removed a hanger and hung the coat away. He looked at the stove where the embers were still glowing, threw on some kindling in the hope they would catch light, and, since he wasn’t hungry, did not go back into the kitchen to make himself some dinner but decided to wait till later and have a cold meal, which would do perfectly well, he thought. He would like to have known the time, but since he hadn’t wound his wristwatch last night it still showed a quarter past eight, and so, as this had happened to him before, he did what he usually did in such circumstances and consulted the clock on the tower of the evangelical church, but, of course, the boards he had put up prevented him opening the window. So he brought in the axe and pried the planks off, opened the window wide and leaned out; then, glancing now at the tower, now at his watch, he set the latter to the correct time and wound the spring. His eye next fell on the Steinway, and thinking that nothing would calm him as effectively as ‘a bit of Johann Sebastian’ he sat down to play, not as he had done in recent years, but as ‘Johann Sebastian himself might have done in his day’. But the piano was out of tune, and had to be readjusted to the full Werckmeister harmonic scale, so, opening the lid, he found the tuning key, found the frequency modulator in the cupboard, removed the music stand so that he might be able to get to the keys, rested the modulator in his lap and sat down to work. He was surprised to find that it was much easier in this fashion to
retune
the instrument than it had been, a few years earlier, to tune it to the Aristoxenus system, but even so it took him a full three hours before every note was where it should be. He grew so absorbed in this that he was only half aware of any extraneous sound, but suddenly, out in the hall, a really loud noise roused him, there was a draft, doors were being slammed, and he seemed to hear Mrs Eszter’s voice shouting: ‘This goes here! And put that down at the end, I’ll put it away later!’ But he was no longer interested, as far as he was concerned they could slam doors and shout at each other ‘till they were blue in the face’: he ran his fingers quickly down the scale to check the pitch once more, then turned to the right page in the score, placed his hand on the pure, consoling keyboard, and struck the first chords of the Prelude in B Major.

SERMO SUPER
SEPULCHRUM

Conclusion

IT WAS THE CHERRIES PRESERVED IN RUM THAT she liked best. The others were nice too, but now, after precisely two weeks of tense preparation, the day had come when, before the very important event to follow in the afternoon, there was sufficient time to consider minor details and she might decide which particular preserves of all those stored in the cupboard of the temporary secretarial office, preserves selected from among various hams and other cold meats taken from Mrs Plauf’s apartment under the ‘social use’ rule and brought to the cellar of the town hall where she and Harrer had divided them up between themselves, she would most prefer for breakfast, and she had firmly chosen this one, not because the peach or pear fell short of the cherries in quality, but because when she tasted the delicate concoction prepared by ‘Mrs Plauf who had met such a sad fate’ the fruit soaked in rum, with its ‘subtly resistant acridity’, reminded her of an evening visit that seemed to belong to an almost antediluvian past, and her mouth was immediately filled with the taste of victory, the triumph she had hardly had time to savour but now at last could wallow in as she sat at her ease behind her enormous desk with the whole morning ahead of her, since she had nothing to do but lean over the jar with a teaspoon so not a drop should be spilt, and lift out one cherry after another, breaking the skins gently with her teeth, wholly immersed in the undisturbed enjoyment of office and reviewing the vital steps that had led to it. It was, she believed, no exaggeration, to refer to the events of the last fourteen days as ‘a veritable transfer of power’ which had propelled ‘one who had deserved it’ from a room in Honvéd Passage, rented by the month, and an undeniably prophetic though hardly, at that stage, significant post on the women’s committee, straight to the secretarial office of the town hall; no exaggeration at all, she thought as she bit another cherry in half and spat the stone into the litter basket at her feet, since this mark of honour was really no more than ‘the direct consequence of the recognition of her superior lucidity of mind’, a superiority that had delivered the fate of the town, with a firmness that bore no question, once and for all into her hands, which were entirely capable of exercising the appropriate powers, so that she should do with the town whatever (she almost said, ‘whatever she wanted’) she, Mrs Eszter, who only a fortnight ago was unforgivably sidelined but was now mistress of all she surveyed (‘… and, let us add,’ she added, trying a brief smile, ‘had carried off all the laurels at one go’), thought fit to do in its present or future interest. Naturally there was no suggestion that the office had merely ‘fallen into her lap’, for she had earned it, having risked everything, but she didn’t mind people saying that ‘her rise was meteoric’, for when she thought it over, she herself could think of no better figure of speech; none, since it had taken only fourteen days for the whole town to be ‘spread at her feet’, fourteen days, or rather, a single night, or, to be even more exact, a mere few hours in which everything was decided, including ‘who was who and who had real power’. A few hours, Mrs Eszter marvelled, that’s all it took, when on the fateful evening, or to be more accurate, early afternoon, some sixth sense told her the task was not to prevent the likely course of events but, on the contrary, to give them
full play,
allow them the maximum scope, since deep down in her bones she felt what ‘those three hundred or so sinister bandits’ in the market square might mean to her, provided—and she had to countenance the possibility—‘they were not merely an army of mother’s boys who, when it came to it, would run from their own shadows’. Well, she leaned back in her chair, they really did shrink from nothing, but she, once having decided on a course of action, had never lost her head, had taken every possibility into account, and moved with absolute and fatal precision only when she had to, and ‘events’ moved so steadily in the desired direction, at the desired pace, that occasionally, particularly later in the night, she began to feel she was plotting and directing their course, rather than taking advantage of their, in any case, favourable essence. Certainly she had a clear idea of her own worth—she leaned forward and popped another cherry into her mouth—but no one could have charged her with arrogance or hollow vaingloriousness, she thought, though ‘they should allow her’, at least now, in the present circumstances, in her solitary cherry picking, ‘the credit, not only for the stroke of genius in conceiving of the timetable of events, but for her care over detail’, without which the grandest schemes are doomed to disappointment. No, she admitted it, it didn’t require an above-average intelligence to wind the few members of the committee she herself had organized in Honvéd Passage round her little finger on that memorable afternoon, especially the mayor, who was paralysed with fear; nor did it take any great effort to arrange that the chief of police, who, as the night wore on, was growing dangerously sober and was about to send out for reinforcements, should, unknown to the others, be smuggled by her (on the pretext of showing him out) into her lodger’s quarters where her female tenant kept the unmanned ‘bag of booze’ serviced with her awful wine right until morning so he would be safely tucked up in dreamland; it was ‘no problem’—Mrs Eszter curled her lip—enticing her blindly obedient follower, Harrer, to find ‘that half-wit Valuska’ who might instinctively have suspected something and put together certain facts in his ‘addled brain’, to find him and silence him by persuading him to leave by the most direct way: no, all this leading of the distinguished company by the nose did not require ‘any particular intelligence’, but the im-pecc-able (the secretary tapped her teaspoon on the table for emphasis) timing of events, now that was something! Ultimately, to have arranged matters so that every part of the machinery should be oiled and working smoothly, ‘planning on the hoof and bringing the plan to realization’ in order that she should be able to sweep away every obstacle before her well-placed allies, all in one blessed moment, and then to build on that precise moment so that she should develop an immediate reputation for muscle, which would in turn raise her to the position of the most likely leader of the resistance, all this, ‘even had the conception itself been of a far more modest nature’, amounted to an achievement—she brushed away a lock of hair that had fallen on to her forehead—that was ‘not exactly ordinary’! Very well, she waved away her own interjection, there was no need to explain that her work on all those apparently insignificant details would have amounted to nothing if she had lacked the central vision by which her plans for the future ‘stood or fell’, since it was as clear as daylight that apart from the harmonization and timing of all the details, the thing that
really
mattered was the timing of the
whole,
in other words to decide, sound out and in-stinct-ual-ize the perfect moment when she could employ Harrer ‘in the police chief’s name’ to bring into play the two policemen in the Jeep who had been waiting prepared for hours, wholly ignorant of the reason for delay, behind the Milk Powder Factory—prepared to go for ‘immediate’ reinforcements, to the county capital … If the ‘forces of liberation’ had arrived too early there would have been only ‘some minor acts of vandalism’, a few broken windows, a smashed shop-front or two, and by the following day life would have carried on as before: if too late, the scale of the conflict might have swept her away too, and it would have been all in vain; yes, thought Mrs Eszter as she recalled ‘the tense atmosphere of those heroic hours’, she had to find the median point between those two extremes, and—she looked round the secretarial office in triumph—thanks to Harrer’s valuable services as messenger and to the availability of constantly fresh information, she did find that point and that meant she had nothing to do but to allow news of the
in
flux of soldiers to filter
out
through her door in the person of the deathly pale mayor who was dying to get home, then compose her mind as to what she should say while the two policemen returned with the message: ‘Would the town’s saviour care to come over to the town hall?’ In retrospect perhaps her greatest moment had been when she stood before the colonel and, without having to change a word of her speech, could tell him the precise truth, though she had to admit that she could scarcely have done anything else, since something in her heart at the first moment of their meeting told her that the commanding officer of the liberating forces would ‘liberate’ not only the town, but herself. Everything, even to that point, had been as easy as pie, and since she took care in her preliminary remarks to disown the title so generously bestowed on her (to the effect that she was no hero, she did only what any feeble woman might do in similar circumstances, surrounded as she was by impotence, helplessness and cowardice enough to bring a blush to anyone’s cheeks), all she needed to do was to present her information in the best order and in simple, clear and precise sentences to convey the ‘sad, but true’ fact that there had been a social breakdown owing to ‘inadequate arrangements on the part of the authorities’, nothing more, the chief police officer not being in ‘the proper place at the proper time’, for if he had the mob could not have been brought to the point of lawlessness by a small group of drunken hooligans. She would not claim, she added when she had finished her account of events, that this state of anarchy was not representative of the town’s condition, for that was precisely what it was, since the circumstances that had allowed this vandalism to flourish had their root in ‘the general lack of discipline’. She would be astonished, she waved her hand in the direction of the council-chamber door on that ‘most glorious of dawns’, if the colonel had the patience to listen to the testimony of all those local people waiting outside, which would be enough to try a saint’s patience, for he would soon see what a pitiable gathering of lily-livered cowards she had had to cope with these last few decades in the noble cause of ‘law, order and clear thinking’ so that they might attain some sense of
reality
(the secretary shivered with pleasure at the word even now in the midst of her meditations) and be led away from ‘the foul marsh of illusions in which they foundered’ back to health, action and a respect for re-a-li-sm, which demanded that all the self-deluded, mystificatory, paralysed members of society should simply be ‘swept away’, along with those who cravenly hid from responsibility, from ‘the daily appointed tasks’ incumbent on them, and those who failed to realize or attempted to ignore the fact that life was a war where there were winners and losers, lulled as they were by the mystical illusion that weaklings might be insured against their fate, who attempted to ‘stop any breath of fresh air’ by suffocating the source with soft little pillows. Instead of muscles they cultivated rolls of fat and bags of skin; instead of fit bodies they encouraged wasting and excess; instead of clear bold looks they went about with self-centred little squints: to come to the point, they chose saccharine illusions over reality! She didn’t want to get carried away, but she was forced to live in an atmosphere that she could describe only as stifling, Mrs Eszter burst out bitterly to the colonel, but he knew as well as she did that no matter which end of a fish you take, head or tail, as the saying goes, it stinks just the same; the court had only to look at the state of the streets to see what a sorry pass the patently unfit leadership had brought the town to, and no doubt they would draw the inevitable conclusions from that … Though at this point, she recalled with a blush, she was hardly aware of what she was saying as she was falling ever more under the colonel’s spell, and he, before ‘the saviour of the place’ found herself utterly flustered, thanked her for her report with a simple nod, and with ‘a look that said everything’ invited her to be present at the interrogations; yes, she had fallen under his spell, a hot flush ran through the secretary, that nod had bowled her over, since her ‘heart’ told her, not with a single thump but with a veritable rumble of thunder, that though no one in her fifty-two years had managed to ‘set off that mechanism’, here was one who could! Here was someone who immediately drew her into his enchanting presence, someone with whom she immediately established ‘a silent dialogue’, someone who could (no, ‘did’, she corrected herself with another blush) make something she had never even dared to think might happen come true! It was a wonder that ‘such a feeling really existed’ and it wasn’t simply romantic nonsense that people fell in love ‘at first sight’, ‘blindly’ and ‘for ever’; that there was a condition in which one stood as if struck by lightning and wondered agonizingly whether the other felt the same! For ever since the interrogations had begun, she really had ‘just stood there’ for hours on end in the council chamber, and even though she did not neglect to pay due attention to the increasingly advantageous procedure, her spellbound being was ‘essentially’ focused, from beginning to end, on the colonel in the background. His build? His bearing? His appearance? She would have found it difficult to say, but until ‘their fate was sealed’ she waited, now in heaven, now in hell (‘He is thinking of me … No, he hasn’t even noticed me’), for the moment that he stood up—yes, he was standing up!—and came over to her to give her some secret sign, practically to declare his affection! It was all fire, all flames within, high on a peak one moment, deep in the pits the next, though no one would have known this to look at her, because even then, when, in the course of dealing with the matter of Valuska, thanks to her presence of mind, they managed to free themselves of Eszter (who, fortunately, had failed to reveal his name) in the most marvellous way without any agonizing prelude, and then, by a kind of mutual conspiracy, got rid of Harrer too by sending him about various commissions, so that finally they were left alone in the hall; even then she was capable of exercising remarkable control over her facial muscles if not her feelings, which she covered with a happy smile at the corner of her lips, there being nothing left that could stop her. She took a cherry, slipped it into her mouth, but did not bite it, simply sucked at it and thought back to the empty hall and the ten to fifteen minutes that followed: the colonel had begged her pardon for his earlier loss of temper, to which she answered that it was understandable that a real man should fail to keep his temper in the presence of so many ninnies, then they talked a little about the state of the nation, and in the course of passionately declaiming one thing and mildly decrying another, he interjected a passing remark about how wonderfully those ‘two tiny earrings’ suited her. They talked about the future of the town and agreed that ‘a firm hand was what was needed’, though they would have to discuss the precise details of how and when the next day under calmer circumstances, the colonel declared, gazing deeply into her eyes, while she, after a moment’s thought, accepted the idea, and, since she had always considered her individual life as subject to the public good, suggested the best place for this might be with a cup of tea and some nice little cakes in her own apartment at 36 Béla Wenckheim Avenue … So everything was pretty well arranged, Mrs Eszter nodded approvingly as she slowly squashed the cherry against the roof of her mouth with her tongue, everything, since there was nothing else that might explain this mutual attraction, this surge of feeling and, now she could say it, the veritable explosion of their discovery of each other, for beside the sheer sense of delight, it was, for her, the compatibility, the immediate recognition of their having been made for each other, the extraordinary speed and power of the tide that swept them together, that seemed the most wonderful, the way—as it soon transpired—not only for her, but for him too, ‘things’ had been resolved in a moment, and there was no real need for those ten or fifteen minutes—the colonel’s words died quietly away in her—merely to ‘build a few bridges’. She hadn’t hesitated, she hadn’t stopped to weigh things up, she had prepared for the evening by giving only half her mind to the immediate issues involved in the so-called, but in all probability, short ‘interregnum’, giving speeches at her gate, consoling the bereaved, making announcements to the effect of ‘tomorrow we start rebuilding our future’, then—since who was she now to fuss over minor matters of transportage?—arranging with Harrer the transfer of her hastily packed effects by a bunch of layabouts from Honvéd Passage to the house in Wenckheim Avenue, and having assigned the wholly unresisting Eszter, whom events had once again bypassed, to the servants’ room next to the kitchen, proceeding to throw out the tired old furniture and, putting her bed, chair and table in their place, installing herself in the drawing room. She dressed herself in her finest clothes, the black velvet outfit, the one with the long zip at the back, prepared water for the tea, arranged a few pieces of cake on an aluminium tray covered in paper, and carefully brushed her hair behind her ears. That was all there was to it, no more was needed, for in their two persons—the colonel, who arrived at precisely eight o’clock on the dot, and she herself, unable any longer to control her feelings—two wholly consuming passions had met, two passions that required nothing apart from each other, two souls who celebrated their eternal union through the corresponding ‘union of the body’. She had had to wait fifty-two years, but it had not been in vain, because that wonderful night a real man taught her that ‘the body was worth nothing without the soul’, because that unforgettable encounter, which lasted well into dawn before they fell asleep, brought not only sensual fulfilment but—and she hadn’t been ashamed to use the word on that dawn—