The Melancholy of Resistance (7 page)

csárdás
—suggested he was capable of carrying on for some time in this manner, and, what was more, he had even recovered (‘… thereyougo … ooplah … sodit … whoopsa …’) his powers of speech to some degree. Eventually everything was ready, and Valuska, having stood aside for half a minute or so to wipe his sweating brow—for he didn’t want to run the risk of even momentarily preventing anyone enjoying the glorious spectacle of the heavenly harmony of Earth, Moon and Sun in such carefully planned conjunction—got down to the business in hand; briefly raising his cap, he smoothed his hair back out of his eyes, swept his arms dramatically before him to recall, what he sincerely felt to be, everyone’s rapt attention and, animated by the intense flame within him, lifted his flushed face heavenward. ‘At first, so to speak … we hardly realize the extraordinary events to which we are witness …’ he began, rather quietly, and hearing his whisper, everyone immediately stopped speaking, in anticipation of the storms of laughter to come. ‘The brilliant light of the Sun,’ his broad gesture took in the driver, who ground his teeth, struggling against the sea of troubles besetting him, and extended to the hypnotically circling figure of the house-painter, ‘floods Earth with warmth … and light … the side of Earth facing it, that is.’ He gently steadied the lewdly grinning representation of Earth and turned him to face the Sun, then stepped behind him, leaning on him, almost embracing him, craning over his shoulder, the intense look on his face suggesting he was merely the medium for the others, and blinked at what he termed the ‘blinding radiance’ of the unsteady driver. ‘We are standing in this … resplendence. Then, suddenly, we see only that the round disc of the Moon …’ here he grabbed Sergei and propelled him from his orbit round the house-painter to an intermediary position between the Sun and the Earth, ‘that the round disc of the Moon … creates an indentation … a dark indentation on the flaming body of the Sun … and this indentation keeps growing … You see? …’ Again, he emerged from behind the house-painter, and gave a gentle shove to the almost terminally furious but helpless warehouseman. ‘You see … and soon enough, as the Moon’s cover extends … we see nothing but this brilliant sickle of sunlight in the sky. And the next moment,’ whispered Valuska in a voice choking with excitement, running his eyes to and fro in a straight line between driver, warehouseman and house painter, ‘let us say it’s one p.m… . we shall witness a most dramatic turn of events … Because … unexpectedly … within a few minutes … the air about us cools … Can you feel it? … The sky darkens … and then … grows perfectly black! Guard dogs howl! The frightened rabbit flattens itself against the grass! Herds of deer are startled into a mad stampede! And in this terrible and incomprehensible twilight … even the birds (‘The birds!’ cried Valuska, in rapture, throwing his arms up to the sky, his ample postman’s cloak flapping open like bat’s wings) … ‘the very birds are confused and settle on their nests! And then … silence … And every living thing is still … and we too, for whole minutes, are incapable of speech … Are the hills on the march? Will heaven fall in on us? Will earth open under our feet and swallow us? We cannot tell. It is a total eclipse of the sun.’ He spoke these last sentences, as he had the first, in the same prophetic trance and in the same order as he had done for years, with not the minutest variation in his delivery (consequently there was nothing surprising in his speech), so these peculiarly powerful words, and the way they drained him, leaving him exhausted, adjusting the strap of his postman’s bag which kept sliding off his shoulder while he smiled delightedly at his audience, did nevertheless have the residual effect of unsettling them and for a full half-minute there was not a sound to be heard in the crowded pub, and the customers gathered there, despite having recovered once, now experienced a new wave of confusion and stared blankly at Valuska and could do nothing to satisfy their inclination to throw some cheery remarks his way, as if there were something disturbing about the knowledge that the reason old ‘Half-wit János’ found it hard to return to the unbearable ‘enervating dryness’ was that he never actually left ‘the great ocean of the stars’, while they, like so many fish out of water speckled by light refracted through the dimples in their glasses, had never actually moved out of the desert.

Had the inn shrunk for a moment?

Or was the world too vast?

Had they heard these words so many times

in vain,

‘the darkening sky’

and ‘the earth opening underfoot’

and ‘birds settling on their nests’,

their wild clangour

alleviating something in them once more,

but only once,

some burning itch

of which, as yet, they had no knowledge?

Hardly: they had simply, as they say, ‘left the door open’ a fraction of a second, or merely—having waited specifically for this—succeeded somehow in forgetting the ending; in any case, once the silence in the Peafeffer had stretched as far as it would go, they quickly found their tongues and, like someone who has become so absorbed in observing the lazy arc of a bird in flight that he is forced to wake suddenly from some dream of flying and sharply re-establish contact with terra firma, they found that indecisive, hazy, formless and ephemeral feeling being swept away by the startling consciousness of drifting cigarette smoke, the tin chandelier hanging above them, the empty glasses gripped tightly in their hands and the figure of Hagelmayer behind the bar, swiftly and remorselessly buttoning his overcoat. In the ensuing storm of ironic applause, they pressed flesh and administered numerous slaps on the back, congratulating the radiantly proud house-painter and the two other, by now wholly insensate, heavenly bodies and within a few seconds, Valuska, having received his glass of wine, found himself alone. Awkwardly, he withdrew from the forest of donkey jackets and quilted coats into a corner of the bar offering more air, and since he could no longer count on the others’ attention, he being once more the loner, the one truly inspired and faithful witness of the confluence of the three planets and their subsequent history, still dizzy after the presentation of the spectacle and the joy of the hubbub he assumed to be cheering he followed in splendid isolation the progress of the Moon as it swam beyond the glowing further surface of the Sun … Why? Because he wanted to see, and did in fact see, the light returning to the Earth; he wanted to feel, and did in reality feel, the fresh flood of warmth; he wanted to experience, and genuinely did experience, the deeply stirring sense of freedom that understanding brings to a man who has laboured in the terrifying, icy, judgemental shadow of fear. But there was no one to whom he could explain this or even speak about it, for the general public, as was its wont, tended not to listen to what it considered to be ‘idle chatter’, and now, with the passing of the ghostly eclipse, it regarded the performance as finished and stormed the bar in hope of a last spritzer. The return of light? The gentle flood of warmth? Profundity and liberation? At this point, Hagelmayer, who seemed to have followed Valuska’s line of thought to a T, couldn’t help but intervene: half-asleep by now, not having felt any great depth of emotion himself, he doled out the ‘last orders’, switched off the light, opened the door and sent them on their way, bellowing, ‘Out of here, you great vats of booze, out with you!’ There was nothing to be done about it, they had to resign themselves to the fact that the evening was truly over: they’d been kicked out and were forced to go their several ways. So they filed out in silence, and while the majority showed no particular desire for further entertainment, there was a couple here and there who, when Valuska bade them a warm good night at the door (it wasn’t possible to bid farewell to everyone, for some, particularly those who had been woken too suddenly and shoved out into the icy cold, were too busy throwing up against the outside wall), gazed after him as they had done the previous night and who knows how many nights before, watching as he, still under the spell of his vision, proceeded on his way with that characteristically cramped gait of his, leaning forward, head bowed, pattering on tiny feet, almost breaking into a run (‘as if he had something important to do’) down the deserted street, and they sniggered behind their hands, and then, as he turned off by the water-tower, burst into loud and healthy laughter, for there wasn’t much else to laugh about—particularly these days, when driver, warehouseman, house-painter and baker all felt as if ‘time had somehow stopped’—except Valuska, who, as they used to say, provided ‘free ‘ntertainment’, not only with his act, but with his whole appearance, with those mild fawnlike eyes ever shining, that nose, so like a carrot in both colour and length, that postbag which never left his side, and that impossibly baggy coat thrown over that skinny body of his—all this was, in some strange fashion, invariably amusing and proved an eternal fount of rare good spirits. Nor was the crowd gathered before the Peafeffer entirely wrong in its surmise, for Valuska really had ‘something important to do’. As he attempted rather shyly to explain when they shouted after him and teased him about it, he had ‘to run the full distance before bedtime’, which was to say he had to run the gamut of darkened lampposts, which, since they no longer served any useful purpose, had for the last few days been turned off at eight o’clock, so he could inspect the silent, frozen city from St Joseph’s Cemetery to Holy Trinity Cemetery, from Bárdos Ditch, across the empty squares, to the railway station, accomplishing, along the way, a complete tour of the general hospital, the law courts (incorporating the prison), and, of course, the castle and Almássy Palace (unrestorable, therefore restuccoed once every ten years). What all this was in aid of, what the point of it was, no one knew for certain, and the mystery grew no clearer when, in reply to the insistent questioning of one or other local, he suddenly reddened and proclaimed that he was ‘driven, alas, by a constant inner compulsion’; though this meant nothing more than that he was neither capable of distinguishing nor willing to distinguish between his home in what used to be the kitchen in Harrer’s backyard and the homes of everyone else, between the press office and the Peafeffer or between the railway points and the streets and tiny parks, that he couldn’t, in other words, discern any vital organic difference between his life and the lives of others, considering literally the whole town from Nagyvárad Avenue to the powdered-milk factory as his abode, and, since a landlord was bound to make his rounds on a regular, daily basis, he—trusting everyone, protected by his half-wit reputation and accustomed through the excesses of his imagination to ‘the free highways of the universe,’ in comparison with which the town appeared no more than a tiny rumpled nest—would roam the streets as blindly, as blindly and tirelessly, as he had done for the past thirty-five years. And, since his whole life was an endless tour of the inner landscape of his nights and days, his claim that he ‘had to run the full distance before bedtime’ was something of a simplification, firstly because he slept only a couple of hours before dawn (and even then fully clothed and practically awake, so it was hard to regard this as ‘bedtime’ in any conventional sense) and secondly because, as concerns this peculiar ‘run’ of his, for the last twenty years he had simply dashed about town in a harum-scarum fashion so neither Mr Eszter’s curtained room, nor the bureau, the junction, the hop, not even the pub behind the water-tower, could be properly considered stations on his eternal flight. At the same time, this ceaseless pounding of his, which by its very nature was enough to cause others to regard him less as one of their own and more as a bit of local colour to put it mildly, did not add up to some permanent, close or jealous keeping of the watch, still less as a crazy kind of alertness, though for the sake of simplicity, or by reason of a deeply implanted instinctive reaction, certain people, when invited to express their opinion, chose to regard it as such. For Valuska, disappointed in his desire to have the dizzying vaults of heaven constantly in view, had got used to staring at nothing but the ground beneath him, and consequently didn’t actually ‘see’ the town at all. In his worn-down boots, his heavy service coat, his official cap with its insignia and the strapped bag like an organic growth on his side, he made his infinite, characteristically waddling, crook-backed rounds past the decaying buildings of his birthplace, but as to seeing—he saw only the ground, the pavements, the asphalt, the cobbles and the straggling weeds that sprouted between them on roads the frozen rubbish made almost impassable, straight roads, curved roads, gradients rising or falling away, no one knew the cracks and missing paving stones better than he (he could tell precisely where he was with his eyes closed by feeling the surface through his soles), but as for the walls that aged along with him, the fences, the gates and the minute details of eaves, he remained oblivious to these for the simple reason that he could not have borne the slightest contrast between their present appearance and the picture his imagination retained of them, and so, in effect, he acknowledged only their essential reality (that they were there in other words), in much the same way as he did the country, the decades that seemed to melt into each other as they passed, and people generally. Even in his earliest memories—dating roughly from the time his father was buried—he seemed to be walking these same streets (only in essence once again, for all he really knew was the small area round Maróthy Square which, as a six-year-old child, he ventured to explore), and, truth to tell, there was hardly a chasm, nay, not even any perceptible demarcation line, between the person he had then been and the person he now was, since, even in that dim past (perhaps dating from the walk home from the cemetery?) when he was first capable of observing and comprehending, it was the same starry sky with its tiny flickering lights in the extraordinary vastnesses of space that held him captive. He gained height, grew thin, the hair on his temples had begun to grey, but, now as then, he had none of that useful sense of proportion, nor could he ever develop anything of the sort, which might have helped him distinguish between the continuous flux of the universe of which he constituted a part (though a necessarily fleeting part) and the passage of time, the perception of which might have led to an intuitive and wise acceptance of fate. Despite vain efforts to understand and experience what precisely his ‘dear friends’ wanted from each other, he confronted the slow tide of human affairs with a sad incomprehension, dispassionately and without any sense of personal involvement, for the greater part of his consciousness, the part entirely given over to wonder, had left no room for more mundane matters, and (to his mother’s inordinate shame and the extreme amusement of the locals) had ever since then trapped him in a bubble of time, in one eternal, impenetrable and transparent moment. He walked, he trudged, he flitted—as his great friend once said, not entirely without point—‘blindly and tirelessly … with the incurable beauty of his personal cosmos’ in his soul (for decades now he had gazed at the same sky above him, and trod much the same route of concrete and weeds beneath), and if his life had anything that might be called a history at all, it consisted of those thirty-five years of ever deepening orbits from the time he left the immediate precincts of Maróthy Square to when his tours encompassed the whole town, for the startling truth was that in every other respect he remained exactly what he had been in childhood and whatever has been said about his destiny the same, with equal justice, might be said about his mind, which underwent no significant change, for the sense of awe—even over twice thirty-five years—is ahistorical. It would, however, be a mistake to believe (as did, for example, the denizens of Peafeffer, albeit behind his back) that he took no notice of anything around him, that he had no idea that people regarded him as a halfwit, and, above all, that he was unaware of the malicious nudges and winks he attracted, which he accepted as his lot. He recognized these things perfectly clearly, and whenever a voice, in the inn or on the streets, in the Komló or up the junction, broke in on his ethereal circuit with a loutish cry of, “Ere János, how’s things in the cosmos?’ he detected the simple goodwill beneath the mocking tones, and guiltily, like anyone caught with ‘his head in the clouds’, he blushed, averted his eyes and, in a faint falsetto voice, mumbled something by way of answer. For he himself acknowledged that, possessed as he was by a vision of which ‘the regal calm of the universe’ would be an inadequate description, the mere glimpse of which he barely deserved and on explanations of which he was constantly willing to launch forth in an attempt to share his slender knowledge (as he tried to share whatever he had) with the limited audience of the frequently depressive Mr Eszter and his cronies in the Peafeffer, he was occasionally quite properly reminded that he should attend as much to his sorry state and lamentable uselessness as to the hidden delights of the universe. Not only did he understand the irreversible verdict of the public, but—and this was no secret—he largely agreed with it, often proclaiming himself to be ‘a real fool’ who would not quarrel with the obvious and knew what enormous debt of gratitude he owed to the town who did not ‘lock him up where he belonged’, but tolerated the fact that despite all his expressions of regret he was incapable of withdrawing his eyes from that which ‘God had created for all eternity’. How contrite he actually felt, Valuska never said, but in any case he was genuinely incapable of directing the gaze of those much mocked ‘brilliant eyes’ anywhere but the sky: though one did not have to, nor could one, believe this in the literal sense, if for no other reason than that the immaculate work, ‘God’s eternal creation’, at least here in the sheltered valley of the Carpathian mountains, was shrouded in almost permanently thick mist, comprised now of damp fog, now of impenetrable cloud, so Valuska was compelled to rely on his memory of ever shorter summers, summers that year by year imperceptibly had become still more fleeting, and was, therefore, almost from the very beginning, forced, however cheerfully, to relive—in Mr Eszter’s characteristically adroit phrase—‘his brief glimpse of ever clarifying totality’ while studying the thick relief map of rubbish on uneven pavements in the annually gathering gloom. The sheer brilliance of his vision could crush him one moment and resurrect him the next, and although he could talk of nothing else (believing as he did that ‘the matter was in everyone’s interest’), his command of language was such that he could never begin, even vaguely, to explain what it was that he did see. When he declared that he knew nothing of the
universe, they neither believed nor understood him, but it was quite true: Valuska really did know nothing about the universe, for what he knew was not exactly knowledge. He had no sense of proportion and was entirely lacking the compulsive drive to reason; he was not hungry to measure himself, time and time again, against the pure and wonderful mechanism of ‘that silent heavenly clockwork’ for he took it for granted that his great concern for the universe was unlikely to be reciprocated by the universe for him. And, since this understanding of his extended to life on earth generally and the town in which he lived particularly—for it was his experience that each history, each incident, each movement and each act of the will was part of an endless repetitive cycle—his relationship to his fellow human beings was governed by the same unconscious assumption; being unable to detect mutability where there plainly wasn’t any, he made like the raindrop relinquishing hold of the cloud which contained it, and simply surrendered to the ceaseless execution of his preappointed task. He passed beneath the water-tower and circumnavigated the enormous concrete ring lined by the sleepy oaks of the Göndölcs Gardens, but because he had done this in the afternoon, in the morning, yesterday and the day before, in fact on countless mornings, noons, afternoons and evenings before, now, when he turned back and started down Híd Road, the street parallel with the main trunk road, it made no sense for him to draw any distinction between this experience and any other, so he drew none. He cut across the junction with Erdélyi Sándor Road, waving in an amiable manner to a solemn and immobile group of people gathered round the artesian well (though they were mere blots and shadows to him), made his familiarly waddling way to the bottom of Híd Road and, skirting the station, dropped into the news-stall and drank a scalding cup of tea with the railwayman who, having being frightened by ‘some enormous vehicle’, complained about the ‘awful weather’ and the chaotic timetable—and this was more, we should say, than a formal repetition of what had happened the previous day or the day before that, it was identical, precisely the same steps proceeding in precisely the same direction, as if it possessed that complete and indivisible unity underlying all appearance of movement and direction, a unity which can concentrate any human event into one infinite moment … He heard the warning whistle of the sleeper from Vésztö (a chance arrival, off timetable, as usual), and when the rusty engine ground to a halt before the perplexed but saluting stationmaster, he took a quick look through the news-stall’s window at the unexpected apparition and the suddenly crowded platform, thanked the railwayman for the tea and, taking his leave of him, made his way through the huddled masses looking lost beside the heavily puffing engine, and crossed the station forecourt so as to continue past the stray cats of Béla Werckheim Avenue—not following just any old route down it but placing his feet in his own bootprints along the frosted and sparkling pavement. Adjusting the strap of his bag, which kept slipping off his shoulder, he twice circumnavigated the law courts and the attached prison, made a few tours of the castle and the Almássy Palace, ran along the banks of the Körös Canal under bare weeping willows, down to the bridge of the German Quarter, where he turned off towards the Wallachian cemetery—wholly ignoring the silent and immobile crowds who seemed to have taken possession of the whole town, crowds comprising precisely those people to whom—but he had no way of guessing this—his fate would be inextricably linked for the foreseeable future. He moved untroubled through that desolate landscape, among the crowds, among abandoned buses and cars, moving as he did through his own life, like a tiny planet unwilling to enquire what gravitational field he moves in, entirely consumed by the joyful knowledge that he may play his part, however humble, in a scheme of such monumental calm and precision. In Hétvezér Passage he ran into a fallen poplar, but his interest was roused not by the tree’s bare crown lying in the gutter but by the slowly dawning sky above it, and it was the same later in the Komló Hotel, where he called in to warm himself up in the night porter’s stuffy glass compartment, when the porter, still red after his exertions earlier in the evening, told him about the enormous circus truck he had seen (‘… Yesterday, it must have been, about eight or nine o’clock …’) rolling through the street (‘You’ve never seen the like of it, János! It knocks your vast cosmos into a cocked hat, mate …!’), for it was the approaching dawn that held him in its spell, that ‘promise kept each morning’ that the earth, along with the town and his own person, would emerge from beneath the shadow of night, and that the delicate glimmer of dawn would yield to the bright light of day … The porter might have said anything at all, might have described the crowds apparently hypnotized by ‘what everyone says is its uncanny attraction’, might have suggested to him later, as they were standing before the hotel entrance, that they should set out there and then to see it for themselves (‘This you just have to see, old chum’), but Valuska—pleading that he had to visit the depot first and pick up the papers—would have taken no notice of him, for though he too, in his own fashion, was curious about the whale, he wanted to remain alone under the brightening sky and stare—as far as he could, for thick impenetrable clouds covered the sky—into ‘the well of heaven, whence proceeds that inexhaustible light until the advent of night’. The way was rather a struggle, for between the railway points and the station dense waves of people were pressing forward, and being used to scuttling along rather fast he found himself constantly having to apply the brakes if he wished to avoid collisions on the narrow pavement, though he was barely aware of struggling for there was something about drifting in this solemn flood of humanity in a state of cosmic awareness that made it seem the most natural of activities, and, hardly noticing the surprising multitude, he absorbed himself ever more deeply in what, for him, were moments of exaltation as an insignificant inhabitant of the planet earth which was even now turning its face towards the sun, an exaltation so intense that by the time he finally reached the market end of the boulevard again (his bag filled with some fifty copies of an old newspaper since, as he discovered at the depot, copies of the new ones had once again gone astray), he wanted to cry aloud that people should forget about the whale and gaze, each and every one of them, at the sky … Unfortunately the frozen and impatient crowd, which by now occupied almost the whole of Kossuth Square, instead of the sparkling expanse of heaven above saw only an inconsolably bleak, tin-coloured mass before them, and, judging by the tension—rather unusual, one would have said, for the appearance of a circus act, an almost ‘tangible’ tension—of the wait, it was obvious that nothing would have dragged their attention away from the purpose of their pilgrimage. What was hardest of all to understand was what they wanted here, what drew them so remorselessly on to what after all was only a circus bill, since the question of how they could tell how much of the doomy prognostications of ‘the fifty-metre truck-load’ was true or whether there was any basis at all to the absurd gossip regarding the ‘spellbound mob’ that was supposed to have grown by now into a kind of army that followed the whale from village to village and town to town was something that the individual locals who had ventured into Kossuth Square (the night porter being counted among such brave spirits) could easily answer, for the exhausted and impoverished-looking mass and the terrifying blue-painted tin colossus spoke eloquently for themselves. They spoke for themselves without betraying anything of importance, for while the sheer phenomenon was enough to prove that those ‘sober-minded, common-sense people’ who only yesterday were declaring ‘the whole thing’ to be no mystery, simply the usual clever trick employed by travelling circuses to create interest, were wrong, and the apparently baseless gossip regarding it was true, the few local citizens who had wandered into the square were, understandably enough, still at a loss to explain either the constant flow of new arrivals or the spell of the advertised gigantic whale. According to townspeople this shadowy army was drawn from the surrounding district, and while the local origin of the by now at least three hundred people was not to be questioned (for where else could they have come from but nearby villages and hamlets, those bleak outer suburbs of Vésztö, Sarkad, Szentbenedek and Kötegyán), no one could really believe that thiry years after the Flowering of the Nation, with its high-sounding plans, there should still remain so large a rabble of frightening, villainous-looking, good-for-nothing, possibly threatening characters thirsting after the crudest and most vulgar of miracles. Putting aside the twenty or thirty figures who, for some reason or other, did not seem to fit (and these later turned out to be the most determined among them), the close on three hundred remaining were notably of a kind, and the very appearance of three hundred fur jackets, quilted waistcoats, coarse woollen overcoats and greasy peasant hats, to say nothing of three hundred pairs of iron-heeled boots, all of which suggested a deep affinity, was quite enough to transform an active curiosity, such as that felt by the night porter, who watched the mob from a respectful distance, into fraught concern. But there was something else: the silence, that stifled, unbroken, ill-omened silence in which not a single voice rang out, and hundreds of people waited, growing impatient, yet obstinately stoical and utterly silent, ready to stir once the acute suspense associated with such events gave way to the ecstatic roar of the ‘performance’, each individual isolated as if he had nothing to do with anyone else, as though it was of no concern to anyone why everyone else happened to be there, or, conversely, as if they were all part of an enormous chain-gang in which the ties that bound them negated all possibility of escape thereby rendering pointless any communication or conversation between them. The nightmarish silence was, however, only one reason for this state of ‘terminal anxiety’; the other undoubtedly lay hidden in that monstrous truck besieged by the multitude, as the porter and other similarly curious observers might immediately surmise, for there was neither handle nor grip nor any kind of chink in that riveted tin box, nothing at all that might suggest a door, and therefore it seemed (however impossible it might be to apprehend) that here, before the eyes of several hundred spectators, stood a contraption without any opening whatsoever at front, rear or side, and that the throng confronting it was in effect attempting to pry it open through sheer dumb obstinacy. And the fact that this tension and anxiety in the lingering crowd was not to be relaxed by any means owed not a little to the common feeling that the relationship between whale and audience was, probably, entirely one way. In the circumstances it was apparent that what had brought them here was not so much the keen anticipation of attending an unusual spectacle, but, much more likely, a sense that they were witnesses to some curiously motivated, long-standing and, for all practical purposes, already decided contest, the most fearsome element of which, they had heard, was the superior contempt with which the two-man company—the owner being an apparently sickly and overweight figure calling himself ‘The Director’, the other, according to stray rumours, an enormous behemoth of a man who was once a boxer but had degenerated since into a general circus helper—treated their audiences, audiences who by any stretch of the imagination could not be accused of being fickle or indifferent. Despite what had obviously been hours of waiting there was nothing actually happening in the square, and since there was no sign that the performance would ever commence, numerous locals, including the porter, were beginning to suspect that there could be only one reason for this deliberate delay: the base pleasure taken by the whale’s attendants in knowing they could command the patience of a crowd practically frozen in the dry cold while they themselves were having a gay old time somewhere else. And, having been obliged to follow this train of thought in order to find a rational explanation, it wasn’t hard to continue along the same path and convince oneself that the ramshackle truck belonging to ‘this bunch of con-men’ contained either nothing at all, or, if anything, then a stinking corpse whose plain lack of interest they disguised by a factitious, if effective, piece of market publicity about some so-called ‘secret’ … In this and other similar sundry fashions they continued their lucubrations in the more sheltered and inconspicuous nooks of the square, while Valuska, taking absolutely no notice of the anxiety around him and still dreamy-eyed from watching the sunrise, quickly wormed his way to the front of the crowd and up to the wagon, cheerfully apologizing as he went. Nothing worried him, and he had not the slightest notion of anything out of place; indeed, having arrived at the front and taken cognizance of the enormous conveyance resting on its eight double wheels, he stared at it as if it were something out of a fairy tale, something whose very size banished the thought of disappointment. Round-eyed, he scanned the nearside of the vehicle from front to rear, shaking his head in wonder and, like a child confronted with a gift wrapped in shiny paper or done up in a beribboned box, he pondered what he might find once the package was undone. It was the curious writing on the side of the van that chiefly fascinated him; he had never seen letters or signs like it, and, having attempted to read it from both bottom to top and from right to left and failed to make any sense of it, he lightly tapped the shoulder of the person nearest to him and asked, ‘Excuse me—you wouldn’t happen to know what it says there?’ But the individual thus addressed failed to respond and having tried a second time, a little louder, and been rebuffed with a deep slow growl advising him, in effect, to shut his face, Valuska thought he too had better stand perfectly still, rooted to the spot like the others. But he couldn’t keep it up for long. He blinked twice,