Satantango (23 page)

. . . etc etc. “OK, write this,” the first clerk dictated. “He is dangerous but useful. More intelligent than the others. Disabled.” “Is that it?” the other sighed. “Put his name down there. At the bottom. What does it say? . . . mmm, Irimiás.” “What was that?” “I’ll say it slowly: I-ri-mi-ás. Are you hard of hearing?” “Shall I write it just like tha — ?” “Yes, like that! How else would you write it!” They put the file away in the folder, then slipped all the dossiers into the appropriate drawers, carefully locked them, then hung the keys on the board by the exit. They put their coats on without speaking and closed the door behind them. Downstairs by the gate, they shook hands. “How are you getting home?” By bus.” “OK. See you,” said the first clerk. “Pretty good day’s work, eh?” the other remarked. “That? To hell with it.” “If only once they’d notice how much work we put into it,” the first grumbled. “But nothing.” “Never a word of appreciation,” the other shook his head. They shook hands again and parted and when they eventually got home both were asked the same things on their arrival. “Did you have a good day at the office, darling?” To which they responded, tired — for what else could they have said shivering in the warm room — “Nothing special. Just the usual, sweetheart . . . “

The Circle Closes

The doctor put on his glasses and stubbed out the cigarette that had burned practically down to his nails on an arm of his armchair, then, checking that the estate was all right by looking through the gap between the curtains and the window frame (‘Everything normal,” he noted, meaning nothing had changed) he measured out his permitted quantity of
pálinka
and added some water to it. The question of the level, a question that needed to be resolved to maximum satisfaction, had required careful consideration ever since his arrival back home: the balance between water and
pálinka
, however tricky the problem, had to be referred to the advice of the hospital chief who, rather tiresomely, tended to repeat his clearly exaggerated warnings (as in, “If you don’t stay away from alcohol and if you don’t radically reduce the number of cigarettes you smoke you’d better prepare right now yourself for the worst and call a priest . . . ’) so, after an agonizing internal struggle, he abandoned the “two-parts-liquor, one-part-water” formula and resigned himself to “one-part-liquor-to-three-parts-water.” He drank slowly, drop by tiny drop and, now that he was over the undoubtedly agonizing “transitional readjustment period’, he decided that he could get used to even this “infernal slop’, and considering how he had spat the first taste of it straight out in disgust, he could swallow the stuff now without any major shock to the system and, he thought, might even master the art of distinguishing between such varieties of this “dishwater” that were beyond redemption and others that were tolerable. He put the glass back in its place, quickly adjusted the match that had slipped off the cigarettes pack, then ran his eye over the “battle order” of demijohns behind the armchair with a certain satisfaction and decided that he was now ready to face the approach of winter. That had not been “such a simple matter’, of course, two days before when they released him from hospital at “his own risk” and the ambulance finally entered the gates of the estate, when his ever keener anxiety had turned to what could simply be described as outright fear, because he was almost sure that he’d have to start everything afresh: that he’d find his room in a mess, his possessions all over the place, and, what was more, at that moment he did not think it impossible that the “thoroughly disreputable” Mrs. Kráner might have made use of his absence to go through the whole house in the name of cleaning “with her filthy brooms and stinking wet rags’, thereby destroying everything that had taken long years of enormous care, not to mention exhausting work, to assemble. His fears proved groundless however: the room was exactly as he had left it three weeks earlier, his notebooks, pencil, glass, matches and cigarettes precisely where they had to be, and, better still, he was mightily relieved to note that when the ambulance drew up outside the house, there was not one inquisitive face at the neighbors’ windows, nor did any of them disturb him when the ambulance crew — thinking to get a handsome tip — carried his bags full of food and the demijohns he had replenished at Mopsz, into the house. Nor indeed had anyone had the courage to disturb his peace after that. He couldn’t console himself with the thought that anything of consequence had actually happened to “these moronic nincompoops” in his absence, of course, and indeed he was forced to admit that there had been some very minor improvement: the estate looked deserted, there was none of the usual ridiculous scurrying around, and the constant seasonal rain that had set in, as it unavoidably had to, seemed to have kept them huddled in their hovels, so it was no surprise that no one stuck their heads out of doors, except Kerekes, who he spotted from the ambulance window two days ago as the man ambled along the path from the Horgos residence towards the metalled road, but even that was only for a brief second because he quickly turned his head away. “I hope to see neither hide nor hair of them till spring,” he noted in his journal then carefully raised his pencil so as not to rip the paper which — and this was something else he noted after his long absence — had grown so damp that it took only one clumsy movement for it to tear. There was no particular reason to be uneasy then, since “a higher power” had kept his observation post intact, and nothing could be done about dust or the damp for he knew that there was “no point in getting worked up” about the inevitable process of decay. He reassured himself of this because he had felt a certain shock on seeing everything in the place covered with a fine layer of weeks-old dust on his return, noticing how the delicate strands of the cobwebs that hung off the picture rails had more or less met in the middle of the ceiling, but he had quickly regained his composure, considering such things as unimportant trifles, and hastily dismissed the ambulanceman who was waxing sentimental in expectation of an “honorarium” for which he was clearly preparing to thank him. Once the man had gone, he had taken a turn about the room, and though in a rather preoccupied state of mind, he started to note the “degree and nature of neglect.” He immediately dismissed the thought of cleaning as “ridiculously excessive’, then, moreover, as “pointless’, since, it was perfectly clear, that would be to wreck the very thing that might lead him to more precise observation; so he simply wiped the table and what was on it, gave some of the blankets a shake, then set straight to work, observing the state of things as compared to weeks ago, examining each individual object — the bare bulb in the ceiling lamp, the light switch, the floor, the walls, the collapsing wardrobe, the pile of trash by the door — and, as far as possible, tried to give an exact account of the changes. He spent the whole of that night and most of the next day hard at work and, apart from a few brief moments of snoozing, allowed himself no more than seven hours of sleep and that only once he thought he’d done an accurate job of stocktaking. When he finished he was delighted to observe that, considering his enforced break, his strength and stamina seemed not only undiminished but even a little increased; though, at the same time, it was no doubt true that his capacity to resist the effects of “anything out of the usual” had noticeably weakened, so while the blanket that kept slipping off his shoulder as it always did, and the glasses that kept sliding down his nose did not in the least disturb him, the tiniest variance in his actual surroundings now demanded all his attention, and he could only recover his train of thought once he had dealt with various “annoying trifles” and restored “the original conditions.” It was this neglect that made him, after two days struggle, get rid of the alarm clock he had bought, albeit only after a thorough examination and a lot bargaining, at the “second-hand” store in the hospital, with a view to strictly regulating the order in which he took his prescribed pills. He was simply unable to get used to its earsplitting tick-tock, chiefly because his hands and feet naturally adapted to the clock’s infernal rhythm, so that one day, when the contraption had delivered its terrifying alarm call precisely on time, and he found his head nodding along to the satanic thing, he took it and, trembling with fury, cast it into the yard. His calm was immediately restored and, having enjoyed a few hours of his all-but-lost silence, he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t decided on the deed earlier — yesterday or the day before. He lit a cigarette, blew out a long line of smoke, adjusted the blanket slipping off his shoulders, then leaned over his journal again and wrote. “Thank God, it’s raining without interruption. It’s the perfect defense. I feel tolerably well though still a little dull after all that sleep. No movement anywhere. The headmaster’s door and window are broken: I can’t begin to guess why, what has happened and why he doesn’t repair them.” He jerked his head up and listened intently to the silence, then the matchbox caught his attention because, just for a moment, he had a decided feeling that it was about to slip off the cigarette pack. He watched it and held his breath. But nothing happened. He mixed another drink, pressed the cork back into the demijohn, and topped up his glass from the jug of water on the table — he had bought the jug at Mopsz for thirty forints. Having done so, he pushed the jug into place and threw back the
pálinka
. It made him feel pleasantly woozy: his corpulent body relaxed under the blanket, his head tipped to one side, and his eyes slowly began to close, but his doze did not last long because he couldn’t bear the awful dream he immediately entered for longer than a minute: a horse with bulging eyes was rushing at him and he was clutching a steel rod with which, terrified, he hit the horse’s head with all his power, but having done so, however hard he tried, he couldn’t stop hitting it until he glimpsed within the cracked skull the slopping mass of the brain . . . He woke up and took, from the orderly column next to the table, a notebook headed FUTAKI, and continued his observations there, noting “He’s too scared to come out of the engine house. Probably collapsed on his bed, snoring, or staring at the ceiling. Or tapping the bed-head with his crooked stick like a woodpecker, looking for deathwatch beetles. He has no idea that his actions will produce precisely what he most fears. See you at your funeral, you half-wit.” He mixed another drink, threw it dourly back, then took his morning medicine with a gulp of water. In the remaining part of the day he twice — at noon and at dusk — took note of the “light conditions” outside, and made various sketches of the continually changing flow of the field’s drainage, then, when he had just finished — having done the Schmidts and the Halicses — a description of the likely state of the Kráners’ kitchen (‘stuffy’), he suddenly heard a distant bell. He was sure he remembered, just before he went to hospital, in fact the day before he was taken in, hearing similar sounds, and was as sure now as he had been then that his sharp ears were not deceiving him. By the time he had leafed through to the diary notes he had made that day (though he found nothing there referring to it, so it must have slipped his mind or he didn’t think it particularly important) it had all stopped . . . This time he immediately recorded the extraordinary incident and carefully considered the various possible explanations for it: there was no church nearby, that much was certain, unless one regarded the long disused, ruined chapel on the Hochmeiss estate as a church, but the distance meant he had to exclude the possibility that the wind might have carried the sound. For a moment it occurred to him that Futaki, or maybe Halics, or Kráner might be playing some kind of joke but he rejected the idea because he couldn’t imagine any of them being able to imitate the sound of a church bell . . . But surely, his educated ears couldn’t be wrong! Or could they? . . . Was it possible that his highly developed faculties had become so sensitive that he really could hear a distant, slightly muffled ringing behind certain other faint but close sounds? . . . He sat puzzled in the silence, lit another cigarette and, nothing having happened in a long time, decided to forget the matter for now until some new sign appeared to point him to the right solution. He opened a can of baked beans, spooned out half of it, then pushed it away because his stomach was incapable of taking more than a few mouthfuls. He decided that he must stay awake because he couldn’t know when the “bells” would start ringing again, and if they were audible for so brief a time as they’d just been, it would be enough to fall asleep for a few moments and he’d miss them . . . He made another drink, took his evening medicine, then pushed the suitcase from under the table with his feet and took a long time picking a magazine from among the rest. He filled the time till dawn by leafing through and reading a little here and there but it was a pointless vigil, a hollow triumph over the desire to sleep, because the “bells” refused to ring again. He rose from the armchair and relaxed his stiff limbs by walking about a bit, then sat back again, and by the time the blue light of dawn surged through the window he had fallen fast asleep. He woke at noon, drenched in sweat and angry, as he always after a long sleep, cursing, turning his head this way and that, furious at the wasted time. He quickly put on his glasses, reread the last sentence in his journal then leaned back in the chair and looked through the chink in the curtain at the fields beyond. There was only a faint drip of rain but the sky was the usual dark gray as it glowered over the estate, the bare acacia in front of the Schmidt’s place obediently bending before the strong wind. “They’re dead, the lot of them,” the doctor wrote. “Or they’re sitting at the kitchen table leaning on their elbows. Not even a broken door and window can rouse the headmaster. Come winter he’ll freeze his ass off.” Suddenly he sat up straight in his chair as a new thought dawned on him. He raised his head and stared at the ceiling, gasping for breath, then gripped his pencil . . . “Now he is standing up,” he wrote in a deepening reverie, pressing the pencil lightly in case he tore the paper. “He scratches his groin and stretches. He walks round the room and sits down again. He goes out for a piss and returns. Sits down. Stands up.” He scribbled feverishly and was practically seeing everything that was happening over there, and he
knew
, was deadly certain, that from then on this was how it would be. He realized that all those years of arduous, painstaking work had finally borne fruit: he had finally become the master of a singular art that enabled him not only to describe a world whose eternal unremitting progress in one direction required such mastery but also — to a certain extent — he could
even intervene
in the mechanism behind an apparently chaotic swirl of events! . . . He rose from his observation post and, eyes burning, started to walk up and down from one corner of the narrow room to the other. He tried to keep control of himself but without success: the realization had come so unexpectedly, he was so unprepared for it, so much so that in those first few moments he even wondered if he had lost his mind. . . . “Could it be? Am I going mad?” It took him a long time to calm down: his throat was dry, his heart was beating wildly and he was pouring with sweat. There was a moment he thought he’d simply burst, that he couldn’t bear the weight of this responsibility; his enormous, obese body seemed to be running away with him. Out of breath, panting hard, he slumped back in his chair. There was so much to consider