The Melancholy of Resistance (9 page)

friend.
And though he was at a loss to understand how he had qualified himself for his friendship and why Mr Eszter did not elect some other person to be the recipient of this distinction (someone capable of accurately grasping and noting the motions of his mind, motions that, as he himself admitted, he understood only vaguely at best), from that day forth he felt it was his responsibility to rescue him from the deadly slough of bitterness and disillusion which threatened to engulf not only him but the entire town. Contrary to what anyone might think, it had not escaped Valuska’s notice, the evidence being so readily available, that everyone he met was preoccupied by the notion of ‘the collapse into anarchy’, a state that, in the general opinion, was no longer avoidable. Everyone was talking about ‘the unstoppable stampede into chaos’, the ‘unpredictability of daily life’ and ‘the approaching catastrophe’ without a clear notion of the full
weight
of these frightening words, since, he surmised, this epidemic of fear was not born out of some genuine, daily increasing certainty of disaster but of an infection of the imagination whose susceptibility to its own terrors might eventually lead to an actual catastrophe, in other words the false premonition that a man who had lost his bearings might succumb to once the inner structure of his life, the way his joints and bones were knit, had loosened and he carelessly transgressed the ancestral laws of his soul—if he simply lost control of his undemeaningly ordered world … It bothered him greatly that however he tried to persuade his friends of this they refused to listen to him, but it saddened him most when in tones of unrelieved gloom they proclaimed that the period they were living in was ‘an unfathomable hell between a treacherous future and an unmemorable past’, for such awful thoughts reminded him of the sentiments and unremittingly painful monologues he was used to hearing on a daily basis in the house on Béla Wenckheim Avenue, which was where he had just arrived. Even more depressing than this was that, however he would have liked to, it was impossible to deny that Mr Eszter—blessed as he was with the most refined poetic sensibility, incomparable delicacy and indeed all the great gifts of the spirit—who, as a clear sign of friendship never failed to spend at least half an hour playing—to him, with his tin ear!—passages from the famous Bach—was the most disillusioned of all, and while he put much of this down to the general debility occasioned by his illness and the oppressive monotony of being bed-bound, he blamed himself entirely for the extended convalescence and could only hope that if he carried out his duties ever more carefully, ever more thoroughly, eventually there might be the prospect of a complete recovery, and his great friend might finally be free of the darkness occasioned by the ‘apparently inoperable cataracts’ of his soul. He never stopped believing that the moment might arrive, and now, as he entered the house and negotiated the long book-lined hall, and considered whether to begin his account with events associated with the dawn, the whale or Mrs Eszter, he felt the period of convalescence might be finally over, that that ardently wished-for moment of full recovery might actually be at hand. He stopped before the familiar door, transferred the heavy case to his other hand and thought of that uplifting all-forgiving light that—should that moment have arrived—was waiting to shine upon Mr Eszter. Because there would be something worth seeing then, something worth discovering—he knocked three times as was his custom—since he would then be granted a vision of that incorruptible order, under whose aegis a boundless and beautiful power comprehended in one harmonious whole the dry land and the sea, the walkers and the sailors, heaven and earth, water and air and all those who lived in mutual dependence, whose life was just opening out or already flying by; he would see that birth and death were only two tremendous moments in an eternal waking, and his face would glow with amazement as he understood this; he would feel—gently he grasped the copper handle of the door—the warmth of the mountains, woods, rivers and valleys, would discover the hidden depths of human existence, would finally understand that the unbreakable ties that bound him to the world were not imprisoning chains and condemnation but a kind of clinging to an indestructible sense that he had a home; and he would discover the enormous joys of mutuality which embraced and animated everything: rain, wind, sun and snow, the flight of a bird, the taste of fruit, the scent of grass; and he would suspect that his anxieties and bitterness were merely cumbersome ballast required by the live roots of his past and the rising airship of his certain future, and, then—he started opening the door—he would finally know that our every moment is passed in a procession across dawns and day’s-ends of the orbiting earth, across successive waves of winter and summer, threading the planets and the stars. Suitcase in hand, he stepped into the room and stood there blinking in the half-light.

He stopped in the half-light, smiling in confusion, and, since Eszter was all too well acquainted with his pathetic and overwrought emotional state on arrival, he calmed him, gesturing, as if by way of greeting, in a manner impossible to refuse, that he should take his customary place at the table used for smoking, thaw himself out after his frosty journey and wait for the fire of his enthusiasm to die down while his old friend amused him with a few well-chosen observations. ‘We won’t be having any more snow then,’ he began without preamble, delighted to continue his previous, solitary train of thought, thereby subsuming all the things that had preoccupied him since morning once the time allowed for washing and dressing had elapsed and Mrs Harrer had, to his greatest relief, departed, ‘as one might boldly state judging from the state of the world at this moment in time’. It would not have been his style to get up and check the validity of such an authoritative statement with his own eyes, to ask the excited visitor currently sitting in the armchair to draw the heavy curtains, stare at the melancholy empty street and observe sheets of newsprint running before swirling waves of icy wind and paper bags passionately swooping between tomb-like houses frozen into silence, in a word to look out on his behalf, for to look out through the enormous windows clearly intended for better days was, in his opinion—he being a master of resistance to redundant gesture—utterly pointless since an act in itself could never be worthwhile given that the question to which it appeared to provide an answer was probably the wrong question, therefore the only question of any importance on waking, to wit whether it was snowing outside or not, could be settled just as well from his present position on the bed facing away from the firmly curtained casement windows, for the peace associated with Christmas, the happy ringing of bells, the very snow itself was somehow forgotten in this eternal winter—if this harsh regime of penetrating cold, when the last, light passion of his own existence was to decide what was to face ruin first: the house or its inhabitant, could be called winter at all. As regards the former, it was still standing after a fashion, despite the fact that Mrs Harrer, who was hired to light the fire at dawn—and no more—came round once a week under the guise of cleaning and, armed with her broom and the rags she called her dusters, set about the house to such effect that she seemed to be trying to accomplish inside that which the frost was very effectively doing outside: she flapped about violently with the rag; lithe and ready for combat, time and again, with inimitable ill-luck, she assailed the hall, the kitchen, the dining room and the rooms at the back; week after week, while little ornaments showered about her, she went about her scrubbing with generous lashings of water and shoved around sensitive pieces of furniture with cracked surfaces and highly unstable legs; in the name of cleaning she occasionally broke a piece or two of the delicate Viennese and Berliner dinner service, so he might reward her good intentions—much to the decided satisfaction of local antique dealers—with a silver spoon or a volume bound in leather; in other words she swept and wiped and washed and tidied everything so remorselessly that the poor building, attacked both inside and out and by now in a perilous state, offered only one place of refuge where things might remain as they used to be—the spacious drawing room, where this ‘ham-fisted champion of domestic order’ (‘Disturb the director at his work? Certainly not!’) never dared to enter. Of course it was impossible to tell her to stop and occupy herself solely with that for which she was paid, for apart from the implied rudeness this might involve—and Eszter always avoided having to give orders or indeed anything that smacked of decision—it was clear that the woman, even if she could not gain access to him or his immediate surroundings, driven as she was by some mysterious force of charity, felt obliged to enter the bitter lists of battle against whatever objects still remained unbroken and would continue even if she were expressly forbidden, a predicament that offered the owner no option but the safe harbour of his own drawing room, which was not altogether an imposition since here he could be understood to pursue the alleged musicological research which enhanced his reputation in the town, and since this misconception kept Mrs Harrer at bay he had no cause to fear for the delicate ornaments and furnishings immediately surrounding him, and, what was more, could be certain that owing to this fortunate misapprehension nothing would disturb him in his real mission, which he referred to as his ‘strategic withdrawal in face of the pathetic stupidity of so-called human progress’. The stove with its graceful copper feet was ‘merrily blazing’ as they say, and as it happens, this was the only item in the room which did not immediately betray the fact that time had terminally ravaged it: for the once-splendid Persian rugs, the silk wallpaper, the useless chandelier dangling from the cracked ceiling rose, the two carved armchairs, the settee, the marble-covered smoking table, the etched mirror, the dull, precarious Steinway and the countless cushions, tapestries, pieces of porcelain bric-à-brac, all these inherited memorials of the family drawing room, each and every one of them, had long ago given up the hopeless struggle and the only thing that prevented them from crumbling and disintegrating where they stood was, in all likelihood, the ten years’ worth of dust that thickly insulated them and, perhaps, his own mild, permanent, practically stationary presence. Continued presence and involuntary vigilance, however, do not in themselves constitute a state of health nor a particularly powerful assertion of the life-force, since, after all, the most funereal of positions was undoubtedly taken by the faithful occupant of the once ornamental
chaise-longue
which had been dragged some time ago from one of the bedrooms, by that man lying on high plumped pillows whose practically skeletal body could only with the greatest of charity be described as gaunt, whose ruinous condition testified less to the understandable revolt of the organs than to the constant protest against the powers that attempted to slow the natural if violent process of deterioration and the spirit that had mercilessly condemned itself, for reasons of its own, to a life of ease. He lay on the bed, motionless, his hands resting exhausted on the moth-eaten blanket in a perfect image of his by-now-stable constitution, which was not in the grip of some slow progressive disorder of the bones such as Scheiermann’s Disease, nor under the threat of a sudden, potentially fatal infection, but had suffered a complete collapse, the serious consequence of allowing the muscles, the skin and the appetite to degenerate through permanent self-confinement to bed. It was the body’s protest against the soft entrapments of pillow and rug, though it would be equally true to say that this was all it was, for the wilful regime of rest which nowadays only Valuska’s visits and the usual morning and night-time rituals managed to break, that final withdrawal from the world of action and sociability, had no effect upon his determination and steadfastness of soul. The carefully groomed grey hair, the clipped moustache, the severe harmonization of his well-matched daily garments, all betrayed as much: the hems of the trousers, the starched shirt, the meticulously knotted tie and the deep maroon dressing gown, but, above all, the still-bright pale-blue eyes set in that pale face, eyes still razor sharp which had only to sweep over his decaying circumstances and his own body to register his highly efficient personal preservation and detect the tiniest signs of deterioration beneath the vulnerable surface of his charming and graceful possessions, which, he could clearly see, were all woven of the same ephemeral fabric of form as himself. And it was not only the common condition of self and domain that he perceived with such acuity, but the deep sense of kinship that undoubtedly existed between the deathly calm of the room and the lifeless cold of the world outside: the sky, like some remorseless mirror, always reflecting the same world, dully turning back the sadness that rose in billows beneath it, and in the twilight, which every day grew a little darker, showed the bare pollarded chestnut trees in the moment before their final uprooting, bent before the biting wind; the trunk-roads were deserted, the streets empty, ‘as if only stray cats and rats and a few pigs living on scraps’ remained, while beyond the town, the bleak deserted plains of the lowlands questioned even the steady gaze of reason that attempted to penetrate them—this sadness, this twilight, this barrenness and desolation, could all be said to have found an equivalent in Eszter’s drawing room with its desert-places, in the all-consuming rays emitted by the fixed dogma which united nausea, disillusion and the bed-bound routine, rays that could penetrate the armour of both form and surface, to wreck the fabric and substance; the wood and cloth, the glass and steel, of everything from floor to ceiling. ‘No, we shan’t have any more snow,’ he declared again, casting a placid, calming glance at the nervous visitor wriggling impatiently in his chair, and leaned forward to smooth ruffles in the blanket covering his feet. ‘No more snow.’ He sank back on his pillows. ‘Snow production has come to an end, therefore not one solitary drop will ever fall again, and, as you well know, my friend,’ he added, ‘between ourselves, that is the least of it …’ So saying, he waved his hand once in a single careless gesture, for he had already employed that same mild gesture countless times before to express the same thought: the fatal early frost that had descended on a dry autumn with its terrifying loss of precipitation (‘Ah, happy years, when it came down in buckets!’) could mean only one thing, sure as the toxin, the undeniable fact that nature herself had laid down her tools and finished her regular task, that the once-brotherly bond between heaven and earth was well and truly broken, and that the last act had assuredly begun wherein we were orbiting alone among the scattered detritus of our laws and ‘would soon be left staring, as fate had decreed, idiotically, uncomprehendingly, watching and shivering as the light steadily withdrew from us’. Every morning, as she was leaving, Mrs Harrer would stop at the partly opened door and unfailingly regale him with increasingly improbable horror stories, now of the water-tower that was clearly wobbling, now of the cogwheels that spontaneously began to turn in the belfry of the church in the main square (today, as it happened, she had chattered about ‘a gang of desperadoes’ and about some tree that had been uprooted in Hétvezér Passage), though he himself no longer considered these events at all improbable, and did not doubt for a moment that the tidings—despite the congenital stupidity of the messenger—were in every respect true, since for him these were absolute confirmation of that which he could not have helped guessing: the chain of cause and effect and hence the notion of predictability were both of them illusions, ‘therefore the clear light of reason was forever obscured’. ‘It’s all up with us,’ Eszter continued, his gaze slowly trawling round the room before focusing meditatively on the stove with its flying, quickly fading sparks. ‘We have failed in our thoughts, our actions and our imaginations, even in our pitiful attempts to understand why we have failed; we have lost our God, forfeited the socially restraining forms of respect owing to honour and rank, neglected to maintain our nobly misplaced belief in the eternal laws of proportion which enabled us to estimate our true worth by relating it to the degree of our failure to measure up to the ten commandments … in other words we have come a cropper, come a painful cropper in the universe which, it appears, has ever less to offer us. If one is to believe the babblings of Mrs Harrer,’ he smiled at Valuska, who was vacillating between utterance and rapt attention, ‘people are talking about apocalypse and the last judgement, because they do not know that there will be neither apocalypse nor last judgement … such things would serve no purpose since the world will quite happily fall apart by itself and go to wrack and ruin so that everything may begin again, and so proceed
ad infinitum,
and this is as perfectly clear,’ he raised his eyes to the ceiling, ‘as our helpless orbiting in space: once started it cannot be stopped.’ Eszter shut his eyes. ‘I’m feeling dizzy; I’m dizzy and, God forgive me, bored, like everyone else who has succeeded in ridding himself of the notion that there is any suggestion of rhyme or reason in making or breaking, in birth or death, in this constant and agonizing going round in circles, postulating some enormous wonderful plan rather than a cold, mechanical, blindingly simple movement … That once perhaps … in the remote past … there might have been some feeling to the contrary,’ he cast another glance at the wriggling figure of his guest, ‘is, of course, possible, but today, in this vale of tears come all too true, it might be better for us to keep silent on the subject, at least to leave the hazy memory of the being that set all this in motion to fade away in peace. Better to keep silent,’ he repeated in slightly more ringing tones, ‘and not speculate about our late creator’s no doubt exalted purposes, for as to guessing how we might best have directed them we have guessed quite enough, and clearly haven’t got anywhere in the process. We have got nowhere in this nor in anything else, because, as it is appropriate at this juncture to point out, we have not been over-generously blessed with the desirable gift of clear sight; the all-consuming over-active curiosity with which we have time and again assailed the sensible world has, not to put too fine a point on it, been far from a resounding success, and when, on the odd occasion, we have discovered some piddling secret we have immediately had cause to regret it. If you will forgive a joke in poor taste,’ he wiped his brow, ‘picture the first man to throw a stone. I throw it up, it comes down again, how splendid, he might have thought. But what really happened? I throw it up, it comes down, it strikes me on the head. The lesson is: experiment, but with caution,’ Eszter gently admonished his friend. ‘Better to be satisfied with the meagre but at least harmless truth, the validity of which we all, excepting of course your own angelic self, may prove upon our pulses; the truth that, when it comes down to it, we are simply the miserable subjects of some insignificant failure, alone in this simply marvellous creation; that the whole of human history is no more, if I may make myself clear to you, than the histrionics of a stupid, bloody, miserable outcast in an obscure corner of a vast stage, a kind of tortured confession of error, a slow acknowledgement of the painful fact that this creation was not necessarily a brilliant success.’ He reached for the glass on his bedside table, took a gulp of water, and glanced enquiringly at the armchair, establishing, not without a certain anxiety, that his faithful visitor, who had long outgrown the domestic role of selfless general help, was more than usually restless today. Clutching the suitcase full of clothes with one hand and a small slip of paper with the other, Valuska looked as if he were cowering in his own shadow or nestling between the spread petals of his never-to-be-removed postman’s cloak as the mild and sober shower of Eszter’s words fell upon him; and he was obviously more and more confused about what he should do. It seemed to Eszter that he was trying to decide whether to yield to his attentive and sympathetic nature and hear his elderly friend through without interrupting him or, rather, to follow his usual habit and, as if by way of relief, immediately give vent to the sense of wonder that overtook him as he walked like an angel through the night- and dawn-silenced streets—and as it was clearly impossible to assent to both impulses at once, Eszter was no longer surprised to see the early signs of such confusion in him. He was used to Valuska’s entrances, to see him swept through the door on a wave of agitation—it was an entrance hallowed by tradition—and accepted the fact that ‘till Valuska could master his inexpressible joy at one or other cosmic phenomenon’ it was up to Eszter to entertain his guest with his own brand of bitter and severely critical humour. This was how it had been between them for years: Eszter talked, Valuska listened, until the moment when the expression on his disciple’s face softened and gave way to the first gentle smile, when the host would be delighted to hand over to his guest, since it was not the content, only the initially passionate manner of his young friend whose answers were full of such ‘wonderful blindness and unsullied charm’ that ever disturbed him. It was one long unbroken story related in the stuttering and excitable prose his visitor had regaled him with each noon and every late afternoon for the last eight years, an endless fantasia of the planets and the stars, the sunlight, the ever-turning shadows, and the silent mechanism of the heavenly bodies orbiting overhead, which provided ‘silent proof of the existence of an ineffable intellect’ and had enchanted him all his life as he stared into the eventually over-clouded firmament on his eternal wanderings. For his part, Eszter chose not to make any objective comment on such cosmic matters, though he often joked about the ‘perpetual orbiting’ as if by way of light relief (‘No wonder,’ he once winked exaggeratedly in the direction of the armchair, ‘that after thousands of years of the earth spinning about its axis people should find themselves somewhat disorientated, since their whole attention is devoted to simply remaining on their feet …’), though later he desisted even from such interventions, regarding them as thoughtless, not only because he feared destroying Valuska’s delicate and brittle vision of the universe, but because he believed it might be a mistake to attribute the sad condition of humanity past or to come to the ‘otherwise genuinely unpleasant enough’ necessity of mankind rambling aimlessly through the universe since time immemorial. In the ascending hierarchy of their conversations, the subject of the heavens therefore lay wholly in Valuska’s territory, and this was, in every sense, fair enough: quite apart from the age-old impossibility of seeing the heavens at all through such dense clouds (so dense that even to refer to them would have been a little untactful), he was convinced that Valuska’s cosmos had no relation whatsoever to the real one; it was, he thought, an image, something remembered from childhood perhaps, only an image, of some once-glimpsed universal order, an order that had become a personal domain, clearly a luminous landscape that could never be lost, a pure religion which assumed that there was or might once have been a heavenly mechanism ‘driven by some hidden motor of enchantment and innocent dreaming’. While the local community ‘given its natural inclination’ regarded Valuska as no more than an idiot, he, for his part, was in no doubt (though he only became aware of this once Valuska took on the role of his personal meal-provider and general help) that this apparently crazy wanderer on the highways of his own transparent galaxy, with his incorruptibility and universal, if embarrassing, generosity of spirit, was indeed ‘proof that, despite the highly corrosive forces of decadence in the present age, angels nevertheless did exist’. One superfluous phenomenon, however, Eszter immediately added, did not indicate merely that people had ceased to note and were actively neglecting such beings, but that, in his own view, the refined sensibilities and spirit of observation that registered such generosity and incorruptibility as distinct virtues and ornaments did so in the certain knowledge that there was nothing, nor ever was anything, to which such virtue might refer or quality ornament, or, to put it another way, that it referred to or ornamented some singular, useless and undemonstrable form—like some kind of excess or overflow—for which ‘neither explanation, nor apology’ existed. He loved him as a lonely lepidopterist might love a rare butterfly; he loved the harmless ethereal nature of Valuska’s imagined cosmos, and he shared his own thoughts with him—about the earth naturally, which, too, in its way, passed all understanding—because beyond the guarantee of goodwill which the regular visits of his young friend represented, which guarded him ‘against the unavoidable dangers of madness resulting from complete isolation’, this one-man audience provided him with constant proof, which confirmed, beyond all doubt, the redundancy of the angelic—and absolved him of responsibility for the possibly corrupting effects of his own solemn and deeply rational views, since his painfully constructed and precise sentences bounced off the shield of Valuska’s faith as if they were the lightest of darts, or simply went straight through him without touching a nerve or causing the slightest injury. Of course, he couldn’t be absolutely sure of this, for while it was hard enough in the regular run of things to establish what Valuska’s attention was focused on, it was clear that this time his own words had no calming effect and that the most obvious causes of his nervousness were the case and the torn sheet of note-paper in his hand. Who knows whether Eszter immediately comprehended the reasons for this continuous tension, or had any notion of the import of the piece of paper Valuska was nervously clutching and twisting between his fingers, but he suspected, even on the basis of such slender evidence, that his visitor had called on him in the office of messenger rather than friend, and, since he was horrified by the sheer idea of something addressed to him or anything that might amount to a communication, he quickly replaced his glass on the bedside table, and—if only to preserve the peace of his mind and prevent Valuska speaking—pursued his own broken train of thought with a gentle but unremitting insistence. ‘While, on the one hand,’ he said, ‘our most prominent scientists, the inexhaustible heroes of this perennial confusion, have finally and somewhat unfortunately extricated themselves from the metaphor of godhead, they have immediately fallen into the trap of regarding this oppressive history as some kind of triumphant march, a supernatural progress following, what they call, the victory of “will and intellect”, and though, as you know, I am no longer capable of being the least surprised by this, I must confess to you I still cannot understand why it should be the cause of such universal celebration for them that we have climbed out of the trees. Do they think it’s good like this? I find nothing amusing in it. Furthermore it doesn’t fit us properly: you only have to consider how long, even after thousands of years of practice, we can keep going on two legs. Half a day, my dear friend, and we shouldn’t forget it. As for learning to stand upright, allow me to cite myself as example, specifically the natural history of my illness, the course of which, as you yourself know, is to deteriorate to a condition known as Bechterew’s Disease (a process my doctor, the wise Dr Provaznyik, regards as unavoidable), and that I must therefore resign myself to the fact that I must spend the remainder of my life in one simple back position, that, in short, I should continue to live, should I live at all, in a cramped and, in the strict sense of the word, stooping posture thereby atoning for and sensibly suffering the serious consequences of our thoughtlessness in assuming an erect position sometime in the remote past … Straightening up and walking on two legs therefore, my dear friend, are the symbolic starting points for our ugly historical progress, and, to tell you the truth, I am not hopeful,’ Eszter sadly shook his head, ‘that we are capable of concluding in any nobler a manner, since we regularly waste any slight chance we might have of that, as, for example, in the case of the moon landings, which, in their time, might have pointed to a more stylish farewell, and which made a great impression on me, until, soon enough, Armstrong and the others having duly returned, I had to admit the whole thing was only a mirage and my expectations vain, since the beauty of every single—however breathtaking—attempt was in some way marred by the fact these pioneers of the cosmic adventure, for reasons wholly incomprehensible to me, having landed on the moon and realized that they were no longer on earth, failed to remain there. And I, you know, to tell you the truth … well, I’d go anywhere to be out of this.’ Eszter’s voice had dropped to a whisper and he shut his eyes as if he were imagining embarking on some ultimate cosmic flight. One could not state with any great certainty that the magical attraction of this journey through space, a longer sojourn in cavernous vastness, would have dulled his appetite, yet it never lasted for more than a few seconds at a time, and though he refused to dilute the acidity of his last remark he couldn’t leave it hanging there in all its over-hasty rawness. Not to mention the fact that the temptations of this symbolic voyage were already, at the very moment of their conception, turned upside down (‘I wouldn’t get too far in any case, and however far I had got, with my bad luck, the earth would be the first thing I saw,’ or so he figured) and that his discomfort at the slightest movement was rather greater than it appeared. He had no real desire to participate in dubious ventures, nor did the thought of casual experiments in some unfamiliar situation appeal to him, since—and he never passed up the chance to draw a sharp distinction between ‘the enchantment of illusion and the misery of its fruitless pursuit’—he knew well enough that, faced with the prospect of such a dizzying journey, all he could count on would be ‘the unique quality of his own immobility’. After fifty hard years of suffering, of trying and failing to cross the swamp that constituted the town of his birth with its marsh-like foulness and suffocating stupidity, he had found a refuge from it. That intoxicating—ah, how brief—moment of daydreaming had proved utterly ineffective against it and he could hardly deny that even a short walk through its mire was beyond his powers. Not that he did deny it, of course, that was why he hadn’t left his house in years, for he felt that even a chance meeting with another citizen, the passing of a few words at the street corner he had at last carelessly ventured out to, might cancel out all the progress he had made in his retirement. Because he wanted to forget everything he had had to suffer during the decades of his so-called directorship of the academy of music: those grinding attacks of idiocy, the blank ignorant look in people’s eyes, the utter lack of
burgeoning intelligence in the young, the rotten smell of spiritual dullness and the oppressive power of pettiness, smugness and low expectation under the weight of which he himself had almost collapsed. He wanted to forget the urchins whose eyes unmistakably glittered with a desire to set about that hated piano with an axe; the Grand Symphony Orchestra he was obliged to assemble from the ranks of assorted drunken tutors and misty-eyed music lovers; the thunderous applause with which the unsuspecting but enthusiastic public, month after month, rewarded this scandalous, unimaginably awful band of incompetents whose slender talents were not fit to grace a village wedding; the endless struggle educating them to music and his vain plea that they should play more than one blessed piece all the time—all those ‘continual trials’ of his ‘monumental patience’. There were many people he wanted to wipe from his memory: Wallner, the humpbacked tailor; Lehel, the headmaster of the grammar school, whose stupidity was unsurpassed; Nadabán, the local poet; Mahovenyecz, the obsessive chess-player, employee of the water-tower; Mrs Plauf and both her husbands; Dr Provaznyik, who, with his doctor’s diploma, eventually succeeded in easing everyone’s path into the grave; they all deserved it, from the constantly crocheting Mrs Nuszbeck to the hopelessly mad chief of police, from the chairman of the local council with his eye for prepubescent girls to the very last roadsweeper, in short ‘the whole breeding ground of dark stupidity’ was to be annihilated in one fell swoop and for ever. Of course, the person he most devoutly wished to remain ignorant of was Mrs Eszter, his wife, that dangerous prehistoric beast from whom he, ‘by the grace of God’, had separated years ago, who reminded him of nothing so much as one of those merciless medieval mercenaries, with whom he had tied that infernal comedy of a marriage thanks to an unforgivable moment of youthful carelessness, and who, in her uniquely dismal and alarming essence, summed up all that ‘multifarious spectacle of disillusionment’ the society of the town, in his view, somehow succeeded in representing. Even before the beginning when, glancing up from his score, the fact of his being a husband dawned on him and he examined his spouse rather more thoroughly, he was presented with the insoluble problem of how to avoid calling his over-ripe fiancée by her astonishing Christian name (‘How can I call her Tünde, after a fairy in a poem,’ he had pondered, ‘when she looks like a sack of old potatoes!’) and though, after a while, this problem seemed relatively unimportant, he never dared utter his alternatives to it aloud. For ‘the deadly appearance’ of his marital partner, which chimed in so perfectly with the quality of the awful choir he was doomed to conduct, was as nothing to the revelation of his better half’s inner character which pointed unmistakably to something military and martinet-like, that recognized one beat and one beat only, that of the forced march, and only one melody, that of the call to arms. And since he was unable to keep step, the martial trumpet sound of her voice made him shudder, and turned his marriage into what was, in his view, a satanic cell, a trap from which it was not only impossible to escape but which made the mere thought of escape appear to lie beyond him. Instead of ‘the basic life-energy and the poor-man’s implacable need for moral certainty’ he had unconsciously expected, shamefully in retrospect, at the time of their engagement, he found himself facing something that, without exaggeration, amounted to an ‘imbecility’ that intensified from sickness to overweening ambition and a kind of ‘vulgar arithmetic’ shot through with the crude spirit of the barracks, a roughness, an insensitivity, an inferno of such deeply destructive hate and crass boorishness, that over the decades it utterly incapacitated him. He became incapacitated and defenceless because he could neither bear her nor rid himself of her (the merest mention of divorce would loose a merciless torrent of abuse on his head …), nevertheless he suffered life under a single roof with her for close on thirty years, until one day, after thirty nightmare years, his life had reached a low point ‘from which there was no descent’. He was sitting by the window of the director’s office in the converted chapel which was the music academy, pondering the significance of some unsettling comments made by Frachberger, the blind piano tuner, whom he had just let out through the door. He looked out at the pale sunset, noted people laden down with nylon bags making their way home down the dark cold streets, and the thought flashed by him that, slowly, he too should start home, when a wholly unexpected and utterly unfamiliar sense of choking seized him. He wanted to stand up, get a glass of water perhaps, but his limbs refused to move, and he understood at that moment that it was not a passing fit of airlessness but a permanent fatigue, the disgust, bitterness and immeasurable misery of over fifty years of ‘being exhausted by such sunsets and such journeys home’ that had him in its grip. By the time he arrived at the house in the avenue and shut the door behind him, he had realized he could stand it no longer and decided to lie down; he would lie down and never get up again so that he would never lose another minute, because he knew the moment he lay down in his bed that night ‘the great burden of human decline into madness, imbecility, dullness, thick-headedness, gracelessness, tastelessness, crudity, infantilism, ignorance and general stupidity’ was not something that could be slept off even in fifty more years. Throwing all his previous caution aside, he invited Mrs Eszter to leave the house at her earliest convenience and informed his office that owing to his state of physical decline he was relinquishing all his privileges and obligations forthwith; as a result of which, to his greatest astonishment, his wife disappeared just like that, as in any fairy tale, and the formal decision concerning his pension arrived a few weeks later by special post, wishing him well for his ‘outstanding work in musical research’, bearing an indecipherable scrawl for a signature, signifying that from that day forth, by the ineffable grace of fortune, he should remain undisturbed and live only for that which he now considered to have been his mission in the first place, that is to recline on his bed and banish boredom by composing, day and night, sentences like variations ‘on the same bitter theme’. Who or what he should thank for the strikingly exceptional behaviour of the institution or of his wife he had no idea, especially once the first waves of relief had washed over him, though the general conviction that his unexpected retirement was due only to the fact that his many years of research into ‘the world of sound’ had reached a last and decisive turning point was clearly based on a misapprehension, a mistaken hypothesis that was not entirely unfounded, although—in his case—it was incorrect to speak of musical research but rather of a moment of anti-musical enlightenment, something that has been glossed over for centuries, a ‘decisive revelation’ that, for him, amounted to a particularly distressing scandal. On that fateful day he was doing his customary evening round of the buildings so as to check that no one remained inside before it was locked up, and finding himself in the main hall of the academy, he saw Frachberger—clearly forgotten by the others—and as so often before, when he had come upon the old man engaged on his monthly work of tuning the pianos, he couldn’t help but hear him muttering to himself. On hearing that muttering Eszter would normally sneak out of the room without signalling his presence, a gesture born of sensitivity (or possibly distaste), and get someone else to hurry the old man up, but that afternoon he found no one, not even a cleaner, in the building, so it was left to him personally to rouse him from his meditations. Tuning fork in hand, presumably so he should distinguish more clearly between those wavering As and Es, this master craftsman lay, as was his wont, athwart the instrument, incapable of making the slightest movement without an accompanying noise, merrily conducting a one-sided conversation. At first his utterances seemed nothing but idle chatter, and as far as Frachberger himself was concerned it was indeed no more than that, but when, having found an as yet untuned chord, he cried out a second time (‘How did this sweet little fifth get here? Terribly sorry, my dear, but I shall have to take you down a peg or two …’), Eszter was all attention. Ever since he was young he had lived with the unshakeable conviction that music, which for him consisted of the omnipotent magic of harmony and echo, provided humanity’s only sure stay against the filth and squalor of the surrounding world, music being as close an approximation to perfection as could be imagined, and the stench of cheap perfume in the stuffy hall together with Frachberger’s senile croakings represented a crude violation of such transparent ideality. This Frachberger creature was the last straw that late afternoon: a fury seized Eszter and, while still in its first fit, quite against character, he frog-marched the confused ancient out of the hall, and rather than pressing the white stick into his hand, practically threw it after him. His words though were not so easily disposed of: like siren voices, they wailed inside him, torturing him, and, perhaps already suspecting where this innocent-sounding chatter would soon lead, he couldn’t put them out of his mind. Naturally enough, he recalled a sentence from his own academic training, to the effect that ‘European instruments of the last two or three hundred years have been tuned to what is known as “well-tempered” pitch’, and though at that time he had seen no particular signficance in the fact, it having been no concern of his what precisely lay beneath this simple statement, the once cheery sound of Frachberger’s solitary mumbling now suggested that it referred to some sort of mystery, a kind of vague burden that had to be shifted before it crushed his desperate belief in the perfection of musical utterance, and in the weeks following his retirement, as soon as he had survived the most dangerous vortices of his own fatigue, he set about the grinding labour of immersing himself in the subject that seemed to strike most viciously at his person. And it quickly became apparent that his immersion in the subject entailed engagement in a painful struggle of liberation against the last stubborn fantasies of self-delusion, because, once having worked his way through the dusted shelves full of relevant books in the hall, he had also worked out of his system that last illusion concerning the nature of ‘musical resistance’ with which he had tried to shore up his beleaguered values, and just as Frachberger ‘took a pure fifth down a peg or two’, so he too toned down the heroic mirage of his ideas until only those terminally darkening skies were left. Peeling away the inessential, or rather evoking the essential underlying concepts, he attempted, above all, to differentiate between musical and non-musical sound, positing that the former was distinguished by certain symmetries arising from harmonics inherent in its basic physical nature, that its characteristic quality lay in the fact that single vibrations comprised a whole series of so-called periodic waves which could be expressed in terms of relations between whole numbers; then went on to examine the essential conditions under which two sounds existed in harmonious relationship with each other, and established that ‘pleasure’, or the musical equivalent of such a sensation, was occasioned when the two above-mentioned sounds or tones produced the maximum number of harmonics and when the fewest of these were within critical proximity of each other; all this so he should be able, without the least tinge of doubt, to identify the concept of musical order and the ever more lamentable stations of its history, whose decisive conclusion he had almost reached. Because of his indifferent state of mind, whenever he learned anything new he tended to forget specific details and was obliged to refresh his memory and enlarge upon it, so it wasn’t surprising that during those feverish weeks his room was buried under a vast mountain of note-paper listing such a great mass of functions, calculations, decimal points, fractions, frequencies and harmonic indices that you could hardly walk for them. He had to understand Pythagoras and his mathematical daemon, how the Greek master, surrounded by his admiring students, established a musical system that, in its own terms, was wholly mesmeric, all through calculations based on the length of a stopped string, and he absolutely had to admire the brilliant insight of Aristoxenus, who trusted to the genuine musicianship and instinctive inventiveness of the ancient player and relied entirely on the ear, and, because he clearly heard the universal relationship betwen pure tones, believed the best course he could take was to tune the harmonics of his instrument to the famous Olympian tetrachord; in other words he had to acknowledge and marvel at the fact that ‘the philosopher most concerned with the underlying unity of the cosmos and harmonic expression’ had, from wholly distinct temperamental premises, arrived at surprisingly similar conclusions. At the same time he was forced to acknowledge that what followed, to wit the sad history of the so-called development of the science of music, demonstrated the limits of natural tuning, and to observe that the problematic process of pitching an instrument, which, owing to difficulties of modulation, firmly excluded the use of the higher registers, rendered it ever more insufferable, in other words he was forced to watch events taking their fatal course, as the essential question—the meaning and value of pitch—was gradually, step by step, forgotten. The way led through Master Salinas of Salamanca, the Chinese master Tsai-Yun, through Stevinen, Praetorius and Mersenne, to the organ-master of Halberstadt, and while this last managed to resolve this issue once and for all to his own satisfaction in his