The Melancholy of Resistance (12 page)

fundamentum
of the place, and standing there for a while in vacant contemplation he suddenly had a vision of the houses, trees, lampposts and advertisement hoardings sinking right through it. Could this, he wondered, be a form of the last judgement? No trumpets, no riders of the apocalypse but mankind swallowed without fuss or ceremony by its own rubbish? ‘Not an altogether surprising end,’ thought Eszter, adjusting his scarf, then, having come to this neat full stop and considering his own investigations at an end, prepared to move off. But, understandably enough, he felt rather uncertain about the sheer idea of stepping from the solid concrete of the gateway to the frozen marsh of the pavement for that solid, static, infernal layer of waste in aspic had the knack of appearing both thick and thin, both substantial and brittle at once: like a pond with one day’s covering of ice, it might crack as soon as you put any weight on it. As a concept, it was thick and unbreakable, the top layer of an infinite mass: as substance though it looked wafer thin, a distinctly hazardous surface incapable of sustaining him; and while he stood there, vacillating between the prospects of moving or remaining, the spirit of loathing and resistance rose up in him once again and he decided that ‘owing to unforeseen circumstances’ he would simplify Mrs Eszter’s prescribed modes of procedure and pass the list she had left him to whoever happened to come along: let them arrange the affairs under his name, affairs that, with the town in this condition, he was wholly unfitted to deal with, let them get on with what remained of organizational matters; as for him, he decided, he should make his way home as quickly as his sanity, the state of his health and the petrified lava of lunar rubbish allowed. Unfortunately there was precious little chance of meeting anyone, the only visible life-form along Béla Wenckheim Avenue being a hardier species of cat, great softly padding packs of them, guarding, in their indolent way, the frozen residue of objects which still held significance for them, but from which, as far as everyone else was concerned, the weight of meaning had been lifted like some unspecified burden. They were overweight creatures, grown visibly feral, born out of a long dream, who, in these favourable circumstances, were clearly reverting to their ancient predatory instincts, witnesses, tsars of a long-expected dark age that seemed as if it would go on for ever, the new lords of a town where ‘as far as he saw, the signs of a progressive and general decadence were all too evident’. No one could doubt that these cats were afraid of nothing, and, right on cue, as if to prove it, an individual beast in one of the packs, one that, judging by the half-rat between its jaws, had clearly not gone hungry, having recognized potential prey in the figures of two members of the former master race in the gateway, was approaching them with an air of insolent audacity. Eszter did not accord any special significance to the cats, but, once he noticed them, made a shooing movement with his hand which was intended to frighten them off, a gesture wasted on the uninhibited rabble that had apparently stuffed itself to the point of nausea; and, since the deference once owing to his species was no longer forthcoming at a mere gesture, its only effect being a cautious minor retreat on the part of the pack, it seemed he would have to resign himself to their company; and so it proved, for, having resolved to move off (and thereby put an end to all that vacillation) and set out in the direction of the cinema and the Komló Hotel, they found that the cats, instead of leaving them alone, ‘as if recognizing, in their instinctive animal way, the change in their relative status’, continued to follow them a good part of the way, at least as far as the hotel where Valuska picked up Eszter’s dinner and stowed it in his lunch-box, at which point, like detectives grown tired of tailing a suspect, they simply gave up and dispersed to forage among the most recent-looking of the piles of rubbish, resorting to their keen primitive sense of smell as they searched for scraps of meat, chicken bones or, indeed, live rats. The whole place looked as if an unruly carnival had not long ago passed that way: dangerous piles of broken glass and shards of bottles of cheap spirits lay before the deserted hotel entrance while, on the other side of the street, a gutted and vandalized bus, which seemed to have collapsed in mid-genuflection about its broken axle, stood with its hood up against Schuster’s haberdashery shop as if someone had given it a vague shove in that direction. Soon enough Valuska rejoined Eszter and they reached the Chez Nous Café, from where, according to Mrs Harrer, the famous poplar tree ought to have been visible (the one which had apparently got so bored with gripping the soil it let go its hold and collapsed, like some harmless giant, across the narrow width of Hétvezér Passage). Eszter, who was undoubtedly still dazed by the general experience of being outside but was thinking only of the rubbish, drew his companion’s attention to it. ‘Tell me, my friend, do you see what I see?’ But it was pointless trying to share his astonishment with him: that was plain the moment he opened his mouth, for, after a moment of confusion (in himself or in the other man?), the merest glance at Valuska’s shining face revealed that, having concluded his account of his dawn reveries, his mind was altogether elsewhere, as indeed it would be, thought Eszter, in one who had spent an eternity wandering the city streets and still did not notice anything unusual in this nightmare landscape—and the beaming expression on the face of his escort on this mournful shuffling walk was perfect demonstration of the fact that he regarded it almost as a kind of negation of the filth underfoot; it was as if the whole occasion were in some way uplifting, and that it was only due to some hallucination, born out of his own weakness and astonishment, that Eszter, having realized his mistake far too late, had stumbled across a ghost town where the old town had been. Ever since they had left the house he had concentrated solely on observing and assessing the situation, had hardly heard what the other man said, and if he had been aware of his presence at all it was merely because their arms were linked; so it was strange that now, suddenly, in understanding everything too late, he saw that there was but one proper target for his attention, that being the figure beside him, the man wearing a cap and a coarse, enormous postman’s cloak, that blissfully meandering conveyor of provisions, Valuska himself. Up to this point—having so far, mistakenly, assumed he was dealing with a doomed but still functioning society—it had not occurred to him that the strictly reliable system of regular lunch-time and early-afternoon ‘angelic visitations’, not to mention his own unalterable daily routine, had, in effect, been organized by Valuska, and that his friend’s strange, yet by now seemingly natural, punctuality might be in some way vulnerable to external circumstances; but now, on this day, a day which might justifiably be regarded as special, here before the Chez Nous Café, for the first time in all their long acquaintanceship, Eszter suddenly became aware of the great risks his companion had been running, albeit unwittingly, and was seized with a terrible anxiety. He saw this ultimate version of the last human environment, and could, at the same moment, for the first time, understand and imagine Valuska’s life, how, without knowing quite where he was or to what threat he might be vulnerable, this innocent, unsuspecting creature, blinded by the starlight of his own internal solar system (‘Like a rare endangered butterfly lost in flight in a burning forest …’), had spent his days and nights roaming through this potentially lethal heap of rubbish, and, having understood this, Eszter could draw but one conclusion, which was that he couldn’t rely on himself alone but required the assistance of his faithful companion, which thought, in turn, led him to decide there and then that, if they ever succeeded in finding their way home again, he would never again let Valuska out of his sight. For decades he had acted in the belief that his intellect and sensibility led him to reject a world whose products were unbearable to either intellect or sensibility, but were always available for criticism by the same, but now, stepping from Hétvezér Passage into the funereal silence of Tanács Street, he was forced to concede that all his clear thinking and stubborn adherence to the principles of so-called ‘sober ratiocination’ counted for nothing, since as long as this town, which he took to be representative of the world, persisted in maintaining its lethal reality, that earthy muddy smell he found such a particularly terrible trial would persist in emanating from it. It was no use struggling; he had to understand that his customary Eszterian mode of wit was of no help to him here, for the phrases he thought of failed abysmally to establish his proud superiority over the world; the meanings of words had faded like the light in a run-down flashlight, the objects words might have referred to had crumbled under the weight of the fifty or so years that had passed and given way to the unlikely trappings of a Grand Guignol stage-set in the face of which every sober word and thought confusingly lost its meaning. With such a world, in which statements employing tropes such as ‘as’ and ‘as if’ had lost their cutting edge; in an empire that was prepared to sweep away, or so he believed, not ignorance or opposition but whatever did not fit there; with such a ‘reality’, as Eszter conceived it with a shudder of disgust and repulsion, he had nothing to do—though at this precise minute it would have been very difficult for him to deny that to enter this labyrinth and then make such mad grandiosely dignified declarations could hardly be regarded as anything but eccentric. However, this did not stop him making them and, on their next stop, at the newsagent’s stall in Tanács Street, the friendly newsvendor misunderstood him and tried to explain, by way of reassurance, that he knew the reason for this ‘strange depopulation’, launching so enthusiastically forth on his explanation that it concentrated Eszter’s mind solely on the task of getting home as soon as his mission had been accomplished, and, should he by good fortune have succeeded in accomplishing that, henceforth staying there. For he had lost all interest in what was happening out here, in what calamity would follow the tide of rubbish, in fact he had lost interest in everything except how someone who had blundered into the arena might seek safer soil ‘before the performance was over’, how he might disappear like ‘a gentle melody in the midst of cacophony’ and be hidden away indoors, secreted where nobody could ever find him; and this thought kept nagging away like some faint persistent recollection that at least one figure representative of him—‘some strangled, orphaned, vaguely poetic sensibility’—had, once upon a time, really, quite physically existed. With half an ear he was listening to Valuska’s rapt account of his experiences of the morning, something about a whale in Kossuth Square that attracted not only the local townsfolk, but (an obvious if forgivable exaggeration) ‘positively hundreds of people from the surrounding countryside’, but, truth to tell, he could cope with only one thought at a time, that being the problem of how long they had to turn the house on the avenue into an impregnable fortress that could withstand whatever chance could throw at it. ‘That’s where everyone is,’ his companion announced, and as they made their way up the main street towards the corner where the Water Board stood (its name had attracted a certain sarcasm in the last few months), he entered ever more feverishly into speculation about how marvellous it would be if, as a fitting climax to their excursion, they could view this once-in-a-lifetime monster together, and indeed Valuska’s description of the circus-owner with his squashed nose and soiled vest, of the hours of waiting by the so-called masses who flooded the market square, the whale’s enormous proportions and all the other fabulous details of the extraordinary creature, far from moderating Eszter’s desire acted rather as coal to the fire, for the whole depressing excursion with its even more important ‘uncanny sense of preparation’ could (and indeed should) scarcely have led to any other climax than this spellbinding monstrosity. If, he thought, and the thought depressed him further, if this monster should actually be in the square, and the enormous crowd and the showman in the vest were not merely a sign of his companion’s desperate attempt to populate the deserted town with the products of his imagination, and the existence of this tremendous spectacle were underwritten by the poster stuck on the walls of the furrier’s shop, a poster on which someone had written with a brush, or rather with a finger dipped in ink, the words: CARNIVAL TONIGHT, then it seemed all the more poignant that the more he looked about him in the surrounding desolation the more everything pointed to the fact that apart from the stray cats they seemed to be the only living creatures about—in so far as, Eszter bitterly observed, such a sweeping generalization as ‘living’ could be made to apply to their own miserable selves. For it was no use denying it, they did look a somewhat strange sight, hanging on to each other as they slowly made their way towards the Water Board offices on the corner in the grinding cold, each step a struggle against the icy wind; more like two blind visitors from an alien planet than like a respectable man with his faithful companion at his side setting out to enthuse the populace about, of all things, a movement for moral rearmament. They had to harmonize two ways of walking, two different speeds, and, indeed, two different kinds of incapacity, for while Eszter’s every step across the suspiciously glimmering surface was taken as if it were his last, each appearing to be a preparation for a gradual but ultimately total cessation of movement, Valuska’s acute desire to increase his own momentum was consistently frustrated, and since Eszter was clearly dependent on him, he was constrained to hide the fact that the body leaning on his left arm was endangering his sense of balance, for while his enthusiasm could in some sense support the spiritual weight of his beloved master, the same was not true of the physical equivalent. One could perhaps sum up the situation by saying that their roles consisted of Valuska pulling and tugging and
Eszter acting as an effective brake, or that Valuska was practically running while Eszter was practically standing still, but it would be inappropriate to consider their progress severally, partly because the discrepancy between their strides seemed to be resolved in some combined lurch forward, an uncertain, painful-looking progress, and partly because their clumsy clinging interdependence precluded their being individually identified as Eszter on the one hand and Valuska on the other: in effect they appeared to form a single bizarre figure. And so they advanced in curious unitary fashion, or, as Eszter rather sourly thought of it, ‘like an exhausted gnome, something perfectly at home in this infernal nightmare’, a wandering shade, a demon that had lost its way, one side of whose body was condemned to supporting the other, the left leaning on a stick, the right merrily swinging a lunch-box, and, as they went on, passing the tiny lawn in front of the Water Board and the silent offices of the Employment Insurance Bureau, they encountered three other figures standing in the doorway of the stocking factory’s White Collar Club who had just glimpsed them and appeared to be rooted to the spot, waiting for the dreaded hand of fate, in the shape of this monstrous apparition slowly approaching them, to reach them (the two groups could well have regarded each other as ghosts), until there came the moment of recognition. ‘Three of the bravest there,’ Eszter nudged Valuska, who was still wholly absorbed in the story of the whale, indicating the ash-grey huddle on the other side (sparing him the supplementary, ‘seeing there is no one else around’), then reminded himself of what Mrs Eszter wanted done apropos her ‘movement’ and set off across the road, steeling himself to the first disturbing waves of missionary endeavour, trying to formulate phrases that might infuse the three men facing him—however poorly they seemed to be equipped for the great reawakening—with appropriate fervour. ‘Something has to be done!’ he bellowed once the formal courtesies were done with, and when he had succeeded in freeing his hand from theirs, one of them, the hard-of-hearing Mr Mádai, whose habit it was to scream mercilessly into his victims’ ears to establish ‘an exchange of views’, kept agreeing with him, and while the other two also agreed, it seemed they strongly disagreed on the more thorny question of what precisely it was that had to be done. Blithely ignoring the issue of what it was they had to do something about and recognizing Eszter as the immediate master of the situation, Mr Nadabán, the fat butcher, whose position among the notable and influential burghers of the town was underwritten by the quality of his ‘gentle and refined poetry’, announced that he would like to call the assembly’s attention to the need for solidarity; but Mr Volent, the fanatical general engineer of the boot factory, shook his head and counselled common sense as the natural starting point, a point with which Mr Mádai disagreed, for, gesturing for silence, he leaned towards Eszter once again and, practically busting his vocal cords, proclaimed, ‘Vigilance, vigilance at all costs, is my advice!’ Not one of them, of course, left any doubt that the central concepts—‘vigilance’, ‘common sense’ and ‘solidarity’—were merely first steps along a logical course of reasoning and that they could hardly wait to sally forth on the mission implied by these noble values and Eszter—deeply relieved at having stumbled upon at least ‘three representative species of local idiot’ at the entrance of the stocking factory’s White Collar Club—had little difficulty in anticipating what would happen if the diversity between the views of three proponents so clearly quivering with excitement and raring to go ever became apparent, so, taking a calculated risk and wanting as soon as possible to yield place to the retreating figure of Valuska, he tried to bridle their rising passions by asking them what united them in their opinion (‘As I assume from the bitter tone of your reply’) that the end of the world had genuinely arrived. The question evidently surprised them and for a single moment the three faces with their different agitated expressions were almost as one, not one of them having expected Gyorgy Eszter to understand the situation; for how, after all, should someone whose existence already seemed to be commemorated in some as yet unwritten epitaph like: ‘He illuminated our daily life by bringing his extraordinary musical gifts to bear upon it’; someone who was an idol of the educated public, the subject of a panegyric in verse which included the line ‘the alpha and omega of our dull lives’, composed by one of the present company, Mr Nadabán; someone who, by virtue of being a genius, was, like all geniuses, presumed to be absent-minded, and who, furthermore, had chosen to withdraw from the noise and haste of the world; how should he have known anything of the matter? Clearly there were many good reasons for him to be ignorant of the situation and the three of them fully appreciated their remarkable fortune in having been chosen—out of all the population of this great town—to inform him of the ominous changes in the neighbourhood. And they kept cutting across each other in their haste to do so: the shops were sometimes full, sometimes empty; education and bureaucracy had more or less broken down; there were terrible problems in heating one’s home because of the shortage of coal; chemists had run out of medicine; travelling by bus or car was impossible; and this very morning, they desperately complained, the telephones had gone dead. This more or less summed up the situation. And what’s more! Volent added bitterly; and not just that! Nadabán interjected; and to top it all! bawled Mr Mádai, and to top it all, here comes this circus to wreck our last faint hopes of restoring order, a circus featuring some dreadful vast whale we have allowed into town out of the goodness of our hearts, against which now nothing can be done. Especially since the really strange events of last night, Nadabán dropped his voice; something more sinister than anything so far, Mádai nodded; since this extraordinarily evil-looking company, Volent’s brow wrinkled, arrived in Kossuth Square. Completely ignoring Valuska, who stared at them with a mixture of sadness and confusion, they addressed themselves to Eszter, explaining that it was bound to be some criminal conspiracy, though it was hard to see what it meant, what it was aimed at, or even to establish the basic facts. ‘There are at least five hundred of them!’ they claimed, but went on to say that there were really only two people involved in the company; one moment it was the star item itself that was the most frightening (they had seen it!), the next it seemed to be merely a diversion from the rise of some kind of mob that was only waiting for night to fall before attacking the peaceful populace; one moment the whale had nothing to do with it, the next it was the cause of all the trouble, and when, finally, they claimed that the ‘shady band of brigands’ was already engaged in looting and rapine and standing immobile in the square at the same time, Eszter decided he had had enough and raised his hand to signal that he wanted to speak. He was interrupted before he could start by Volent, who declared that people were frightened; we cannot stand by and twiddle our thumbs, Nadabán interjected; not while they are plotting our doom, Mádai added in his characteristic fashion. There are children here, Nadabán wiped away a tear; and weeping mothers, Mádai trumpeted; and the most precious thing of all, hearth and home, the family, Volent added, his voice trembling with emotion, all under a terrible threat … One could imagine where this chorus of lamentation might have led if the chorus were not interrupted; one could only imagine since no one would ever know, for they found themselves so weighed down by the air of general gloom they had temporarily run out of breath. Eszter seized the initiative and, bearing in mind the wretched state of their nerves and the tortured condition of their souls, announced that there was, he was pleased to say, a solution: the situation may yet be turned to advantage and secured by a powerful sense of commitment. Without further ado he presented them with the essential programme of the movement for A TIDY YARD, AN ORDERLY HOUSE, the central concern of which, he explained as he looked away somewhere in the distance above their heads, spoke for itself, and if his friends would allow him he would assume the role of ‘ombudsman-in-chief for waste’ and ‘general inspector of refuse’, adding only that he did not doubt for a second the success of their mutual collaboration nor the effective organizational powers of the three gentlemen before him. It was as much as he could do to wait while Valuska handed over the programme for action and explained it all in the most exhaustive detail, and once his companion had finished, he turned on his heels and, compressing the whole act of farewell into a single wave of the hand, left them to digest the information for themselves. He was certain that the seed of Mrs Eszter’s generative words had fallen on fertile soil and that there was nothing more for him to do but to wipe the events of the last quarter of an hour from his mind as thoroughly as he could, so that when his audience of three recovered from his abrupt departure and broke into a spontaneous ecstasy of passion, crying, ‘We shall overcome! Wonderful idea! Solidarity! Common sense! Vigilance!’ he would no longer hear it, and so, drawing strength from the slender comfort that, having exercised his powers of patience to absolute breaking point, he had at least finally rid himself of the burden of his task, he returned to his incomplete plans and tried to think as carefully as he could through possible courses of action. He was aware that news of ‘the successful completion of his assignment’ had to reach his wife unconditionally and in good time (‘And in a few minutes’ time it will be four o’clock already!’), otherwise her threats would certainly be carried out, so, putting an end to the efforts of Valuska, who, having been confused by the preceding gabble, was trying to prove to him the groundlessness of his fears about the circus, he announced that, ‘conscious of a job well done’, he was off home now, but—and here he gave Valuska a significant look, one, however, that did not reveal the full extent of his plans—he would first ask him that whenever he finished whatever remained to do in Honvéd Passage he should return immediately. Naturally, Valuska protested that he couldn’t leave him alone in such cold weather, not to mention abandoning ‘the idea of seeing the whale’, so Eszter was forced to go into a little more detail, interrupting himself only to reassure Valuska that everything was perfectly all right and that he’d manage (‘Look, my friend,’ he said, ‘I cannot say I like the inexorable grip of frost, nor, on the other hand, that my existence here represents the tragedy of a tropical temperament condemned to spend eternity in the empire of snow, since as you know there is no snow, nor shall there be ever again, so let’s not even discuss it. Have no doubt, however, that I am capable of making my way back home over the little distance that remains unaided, even in this cold weather. And another thing,’ he added, ‘don’t spend too much time in regretting the brief postponement of the climax of our memorable adventure. I would happily have made the acquaintance of the majestic being, but we must give it up for the time being. It is, I find,’ he smiled at Valuska, ‘always pleasant and entertaining to come upon a creature on one of the points of the evolutionary scale at which I, personally, would gladly have stopped, but this walk has exhausted me and my rendezvous with your whale will, I imagine, wait till tomorrow … ’ His voice no longer had the sharpness it once had and he was aware that the intention of being witty was far more evident than the wit itself, but since there was a latent commitment in what he said, Valuska, albeit somewhat unhappily, accepted his proposition; so the rest of their way together Eszter remained undisturbed and free to plan the occasion of their next meeting. He came to the conclusion that thanks to Mrs Harrer’s destructive passion for cleanliness, apart from the barricading of the gates and the boarding up of the windows, there was little else needed to make the house habitable, and relieved by this thought he fell to speculating as to what ‘life à deux might be like’. With great care and precision he defined Valuska’s place in the magnetic swamp of his house in the space beside the drawing room, as close to his own as possible, and imagined ‘peaceful mornings spent together’ and ‘silent evenings full of harmony’. He could see them now, sitting together in deep tranquillity, brewing up coffee in the afternoons and preparing hot dinner at least twice a week; his friend would launch forth on his astronomical reveries and he would pass his usual deprecatory remarks, and in so doing they would forget the rubbish, the fading props of the world, the very world itself … He noticed (and the consciousness naturally somewhat embarrassed him) that having got so far with his plans he had begun to shed a few sentimental tears, so he quickly looked round again and, casting his mind back to his sufferings, concluded that in view of his weakened condition (‘Being an old man, as indeed I am’) such a show of emotion was, for once, quite forgivable. He took the ice-cold lunch-box from Valuska, made him swear that as soon as his business was finished he would come straight over, and, after a few other minor admonitions, somewhere in the region of Hétvezér Passage, watched him disappear from view.