Satantango

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Satantango Page 4

by László Krasznahorkai


  III.

  To Know Something

  At the end of the Paleozoic era the whole of Central Europe begins to sink. Naturally, our Hungarian homeland is part of this process. In the new geological circumstances the hill masses of the Paleozoic era sink ever lower until they reach rock bottom, at which point the sedimental sea inundates and covers them. As the sinking continues the territory of Hungary becomes the northwestern basin of that part of the sea that covers Southern Europe. The sea continues to dominate the region right through the Mesozoic era. The doctor was sitting by the window feeling morose, his shoulder up against the cold, damp wall and he didn’t even have to move his head to look through the gap between the dirty floral curtain inherited from his mother and the rotten window-frame in order to see the estate, but had only to raise his eyes from his book, take a brief glance to note the slightest change and if it now and then happened — say if he was utterly lost in thought or because he had focused on one of the remotest points of the estate — that his eyes missed something, his exceedingly sharp ears immediately came to his aid, though it was rare for him to be lost in thought and rarer still for him to rise in his fur-collared winter coat from the heavily-blanketed, stuffed armchair — its position precisely determined by the cumulative experience of his everyday activities, succesfully reducing to a minimum the number of possible occasions on which he would have to leave his observation post by the window. Of course on a day-to-day basis, this was by no means an easy task. On the contrary: he had to collect and arrange, in the optimal fashion, all that was necessary for eating, drinking, smoking, diary writing, and reading as well as the countless other little necessary details of daily life and, what was more, it meant he had to give up the idea of letting the odd slip — due entirely to some personal weakness — go unpunished, for, if he did so, he would be acting against his own interests, since an error due to distraction or carelessness increased the danger and the consequences were far graver than a man might think: one superfluous movement might mask a sign of the onset of vulnerability; a matchstick or brandy glass in the wrong place was a monument to the destructive effects of declining memory, not to mention the fact that it necessitated further modifications of behavior, so, sooner or later, it would mean reconsidering the place of the cigarette, the notebook, the knife and the pencil too, and soon “the whole system of optimal movement” would be obliged to change, chaos would ensue and all would be lost. It had not been the work of a moment establishing the best conditions for observation, no, it had taken years, a series of day-by-day refinements — a process of self-flagellation, punishment, and wave after wave of nausea following endless errors — but with the passing of initial uncertainty, and the occasional bout of despair, the time came when he no longer had to watch each and every distinct movement, when objects finally arrived at their fixed, final positions and he himself could assume firm, automatic control of his sphere of action at the most minute level, at which point he could admit to himself, without any danger of self-deception or overconfidence, that his life was capable of functioning perfectly. Of course it took a while, even months after achieving this, for the fear to leave him because he knew that however faultless his assessment of his situation in the neighborhood might be, he still, alas, depended on others for his supplies of food, spirits, cigarettes and other invaluable items. His anxieties about Mrs. Kráner, whom he had entrusted with his food shopping, and his doubts about the pub landlord, immediately proved to be unfounded: the woman was punctilious and it had proved possible to wean her off the practice of appearing at the most inopportune moments with the some exotic foodstuff she had purloined on the estate, crying, “Don’t let it cool down, doctor.” As regards the drink he bought it in large quantities at long intervals, either buying it himself, or — more frequently — as a kind of insurance, entrusting the landlord with the task, since the latter feared that the unpredictable doctor might one day withdraw his confidence thereby depriving him of an assured income, and therefore did his utmost to satisfy the doctor in every particular, even when those particulars seemed downright stupid to him. So there was nothing to fear regarding these two people and as for the other residents of the estate, they had long abandoned hope that they might encroach on his privacy with a sudden attack of fever, stomach upset or general accident as pretext without at least a warning call since they were all convinced that, with his withdrawal of such privileges, his professionalism and reliability had also vanished. While this was clearly something of an exaggeration the feeling was not entirely unfounded since he dedicated the greatest part of what strength remained to him to preserving his powers of memory and letting all inessential matters take care of themselves. Despite all this he still lived in a constant state of anxiety because — as he noted in his diary with conspicuous regularity — “these things take all my attention!” so it didn’t matter whether it was Mrs. Kráner or the landlord he spotted at his door, he would scrutinize either silently for minutes on end, looking deep into their eyes, checking to see whether they would look down, noting how quickly they averted their gaze, to see, in other words, how far their eyes betrayed them, revealing their suspicion, curiosity and fear, from which evidence he endeavored to tell whether they were still willing to stick to the agreement on which their financial arrangements depended, and only allowing them to approach once he was satisfied. He kept contact to a minimum, refusing to return their greetings, casting only a glance at the full bags they carried, watching their clumsy movements with such an unfriendly expression on his face, hearing their awkwardly formulated questions and excuses so impatiently, muttering away the while, that they (particularly Mrs. Kráner) constantly bit off their sentences, quickly put away the money he had put out for them and hastened away without counting it. This more or less explained why he was so nervous about being anywhere near the door: it made him feel decidedly ill, gave him a headache or made him feel breathless every time he was obliged (due to some carelessness on their part) to get up out of the armchair and fetch something from the far end of the room, so that each time he did (only after a long preliminary struggle with himself) he strove to be through with it as quickly as possible, although, no matter how quickly he did it, by the time he got back to his chair his day had been ruined and he was seized by a mysterious bottomless anxiety, so the hand holding the pencil or the glass began to tremble and he filled his journal with nervous little jottings that, naturally, he scrubbed out with crude, furious movements. It was no wonder then that everything in this accursed corner of the estate was upside-down: the mud that had been trailed in had dried in thick layers on the wholly rotten, disintegrating floorboards; weeds grew by the wall nearest the door and, off to the right, lay a barely recognizable hat that had been trampled flat, surrounded by remnants of food, plastic bags, a few empty medicine bottles, bits of notepaper and worn-down pencils. The doctor — quite contrary, some believed, to his perhaps exaggerated and probably pathological love of order — did nothing to remedy this intolerable situation; he was convinced that his small corner of the estate was part of the hostile outside world and this was all the evidence he needed to justify his fear, anxiety, restlessness and uncertainty, for there was only a single “defensive wall” to protect him, the rest being “vulnerable.” The room opened on to a dark corridor where weeds grew, this being the way to the toilet whose cistern had not worked for years, its absence being remedied by a bucket that Mrs. Kráner was obliged to refill three days a week. At one end of the corridor were two doors with great rusty locks hanging from them; the other end led outside. Mrs. Kráner, who had her own keys to the place, could always smell the strong sour stench as soon as she entered: it got into her clothes and, as she always insisted, it settled in her skin as well so it was no use trying to wash it off, even washing twice, on the days when she was “visiting the doctor”: her efforts were pointless. That was the reason she gave Mrs. Halics and Mrs. Schmidt for the brief time she spent indoors: she was simply incapable of enduring the stench for
more than two minutes at a time, because “I tell you, that smell is unbearable, simply unbearable, I don’t even know how it is possible to live with such a terrible smell. He is after all an educated man and can see . . .” The doctor ignored the unbearable smell as he did everything else that did not directly impinge on his observation post, and the more he ignored such things the more attention and expertise he devoted to maintaining the order around him — the food, the cutlery, the cigarettes, the matches and the book — all with the correct distance between them on the table, the windowsill, the area round the armchair and the fiercely aggressive rot on the already ruined floorboards, and at dusk he would feel a warm glow, a degree of contentment, on surveying the suddenly darkening room, recognizing that everything was under his firm, omnipotent control. He had been aware for months that there was no point in further experimentation but then he realized that, even if he wanted to, he was unable to make the slightest change to any of it; no modification could conclusively be proved better because he was afraid that in itself the desire for change was only a subtle sign of his failing memory. So, doing nothing, he simply remained on the alert, careful to preserve his failing memory against the decay that consumed everything around him, much as he had done from the moment that he — once the closing of the estate had been announced and he personally had decided to stay behind and survive on what remained until “the decision to reverse the closure should be taken” — had gone up to the mill with the elder Horgos girl to observe the terrible racket of the abandonment of the place, with everyone rushing round and shouting, the trucks in the distance like refugees fleeing the scene, when it seemed to him that the mill’s death-sentence had brought the whole estate to a condition of near collapse, and from that day on he felt too weak to halt by himself the triumphal progress of the wrecking process, however he might try, there being nothing he could do in the face of the power that ruined houses, walls, trees and fields, the birds that dived from their high stations, the beasts that scurried forth, and all human bodies, desires and hopes, knowing he wouldn’t, in any case, have the strength, however he tried, to resist this treacherous assault on humanity; and, knowing this, he understood, just in time, that the best he could do was to use his memory to fend off the sinister, underhanded process of decay, trusting in the fact that since all that mason might build, carpenter might construct, woman might stitch, indeed all that men and women had brought forth with bitter tears was bound to turn to an undifferentiated, runny, underground, mysteriously ordained mush, his memory would remain lively and clear, right until his organs surrendered and “conformed to the contract whereby their business affairs were wound up,” that is to say until his bones and flesh fell prey to the vultures hovering over death and decay. He decided to watch everything very carefully and to record it constantly, all with the aim of not missing the smallest detail, because he realized with a shock that to ignore the apparently insignificant was to admit that one was condemned to sit defenseless on the parapet connecting the rising and falling members of the bridge between chaos and comprehensible order. However apparently insignificant the event, whether it be the ring of tobacco ash surrounding the table, the direction from which the wild geese first appeared, or a series of seemingly meaningless human movements, he couldn’t afford to take his eyes off it and must note it all down, since only by doing so could he hope not to vanish one day and fall a silent captive to the infernal arrangement whereby the world decomposes but is at the same time constantly in the process of self-construction. It was not, however, enough to remember things conscientiously: that “was insufficient in itself,” not up to the task: one had to compile and comprehend such signs as still remained in order to discover the means whereby the perfectly maintained memory’s sphere of influence might be extended and sustained over a period. The best course then, thought the doctor during his visit to the mill, would be “to reduce to a minimum such events as would tend to increase the number of things I have to keep an eye on” and that very night, having told the useless Horgos girl to clear off home, informing her he no longer required her services, he set up his observation post by the window and began planning the elements of a system that some people might consider insane. Dawn was beginning to break outside and in the distance, four ragged crows were wheeling menacingly above the Szikes, so he adjusted the blanket round his shoulders and automatically lit a cigarette. During the Cretaceous period, it has since been discovered, there were two classes of material that comprised the body of our homeland. An inner mass shows signs of more regular sinking. A trough-like region develops that is progressively filled in and all but buried by a kind of basin deposit, At the periphery of the trough on the other hand we find signs of folding, that is to say a synclinal system is in formation . . . And now a new chapter begins in the history of the landmass that is inner Hungary, a new developmental stage in which, as by a process of reaction, the so far close relationship between the framework of outer folds and the inner mass breaks down. The tensions within the earth’s crust seek an equilibrium which does in fact duly follow when the unyielding inner mass that had hitherto been the determinant begins to collapse and sink, thereby bringing into existence one of the most beautiful basin groups in Europe and, as the sinking continues the basin is filled by the neogene sea. He looked up from his book and saw an unexpected wind had suddenly sprung up as if intent on trashing the area; in the east the horizon was flooded by bright red sunlight and then, all at once, the orb itself appeared, pale and wan in a heap of louring cloud. On the narrow path beside the Schmidts’ and the headmaster’s houses the acacias were panicking, shaking their tiny crowns in surrender; the wind was wildly driving dense balls of dead leaves before it and a terrified black cat darted through the fence of the headmaster’s house. He pushed aside his book, pulled out his journal and shivered in the cool draft that crept through the window. He stubbed out his cigarette on the wooden arm of his chair, put on his glasses, ran his eye over what he had written in the night, then noted by way of continuation: “Storm coming, must put the window rags in place for the evening. Futaki still inside. A cat in the headmaster’s, one I haven’t seen before. What the hell is a cat doing here?! It must have been frightened by something, it squeezed through such a narrow gap . . . its spine practically flat against the ground, it only took a moment. I can’t sleep. I have a headache.” He drained the contents of his pálinka glass then immediately refilled it to the same level. He removed his spectacles and closed his eyes. He saw a vague, barely distinguishable figure, a tall awkward man with a large body dashing into the darkness: only later did he notice that the road, that “crooked road littered with many obstacles” came to a sudden end. He did not wait for the figure to fall down the chasm but opened his eyes in fear. Suddenly it was as if a bell were tolling, though only for a moment, then silence. A bell? And quite close, too! . . . Or so it seemed for a moment. Very close. He surveyed the estate with an icy expression. He saw a blurred face in the Schmidts’ window and quickly recognized Futaki’s creased features: he looked scared, leaning out of the open window, searching intently for something above the houses. What did he want? The doctor pulled a notebook marked FUTAKI from among the pile of writings at the end of the able and found the relevant page. “Futaki is frightened of something. He was looking out of the window at dawn with a startled expression. Futaki fears death.” He threw back his pálinka and quickly refilled the glass. He lit a cigarette and remarked aloud: “You’ll all cheese it soon. You too are going to cheese it, Futaki. Don’t get so worked up.” After a few moments the rain began to fall. Soon enough it was pouring down, quickly filling the shallower ditches; tiny streams were already zigzagging in every direction like liquid lightning. The doctor watched all this, deeply absorbed, then set to make a rough sketch of the scene in his notebook, carefully and conscientiously marking the smallest puddle, the direction of the current and, having finished, noting the time underneath. The room slowly brightened: the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling threw a c
old light over it. The doctor forced himself up from the chair, pushed away the blanket and turned the light off before settling back again. He took a can of fish and some cheese from the cardboard box at the left hand side of the chair. The cheese had grown moldy here and there and the doctor took some time examining it before throwing it into the litter basket by the door. He opened the can and slowly and methodically chewed his way through mouthfuls before swallowing them. Then he threw back another glass of pálinka. He was no longer cold but kept the blankets round him for a while. He laid his book in his lap then suddenly filled up his glass. It is interesting to note at the end of the Ponticum era, when the great lowland sea had mostly subsided leaving a large shallow lake roughly the size of the Balaton, how much destruction was caused by the combined forces of the wind and water in the beating of the waves. What is this supposed to be, prophecy or geological history? the doctor fumed. He turned the page. At the same time the entire area of the Lowlands begins to rise and so the waters of lesser lakes start to drain off to more distant territories too. Without the epirogenetic elevation of this central Tisian mass we could not begin to explain the rapid disappearance of the Levantine lakes. In the Pleistocene era, after the disappearance of the various standing waters, only minor lakes, marshes and bogs remained as signs of the lost inland sea . . . The text, in Dr. Benda’s local edition, did not sound at all convincing, the evidence insufficient, the crude logic of the argument not worth taking seriously, or so he felt without having any knowledge of the subject, uncertain even of the technical terms employed; nevertheless, as he read, the history of the earth that had seemed so solid, so fixed under and around him, came alive, though the unknown author’s awkward, unpolished style — the book being written now in the present and now in the past tense — confused him, so he couldn’t be sure whether he was reading a work of prophecy regarding the earth’s condition after the demise of humanity or a proper work of geological history based on the planet on which he actually lived. His imagination was bewitched almost to the point of paralysis by the notion that this estate with its rich, generous soil was, only a few million years ago, covered by the sea . . . that it had alternated between sea and dry land, and suddenly — even as he conscientiously noted down the stocky, swaying figure of Schmidt in his soggy quilted jacket and boots heavy with mud appearing on the path from Szikes, hurrying as if he feared being spotted, sliding in through the back door of his house — he was lost in successive waves of time, coolly aware of the minimal speck of his own being, seeing himself as the defenseless, helpless victim of the earth’s crust, the brittle arc of his life between birth and death caught up in the dumb struggle between surging seas and rising hills, and it was as if he could already feel the gentle tremor beneath the chair supporting his bloated body, a tremor that might be the harbinger of seas about to break in on him, a pointless warning to flee before its all encompassing power made escape impossible, and he could see himself running, part of a desperate, terrified stampede comprising stags, bears, rabbits, deer, rats, insects and reptiles, dogs and men, just so many futile, meaningless lives in the common, incomprehensible devastation, while above them flapped clouds of birds, dropping in exhaustion, offering the only possible hope. For a few minutes he was contemplating a vague plan, thinking it might be better to abandon his earlier experiments and thus make available the energy required “to liberate himself from desire,” to gradually wean himself off food, alcohol and cigarettes, to opt for silence rather than the constant struggle of naming things and so, after a few months, or perhaps just one or two weeks, he might reach a condition entirely without waste and instead of leaving a trail behind him to dissolve in the terminal silence that was in any case urgently calling to him . . . but within a few moments all this seemed quite ridiculous, and maybe it was, after all, little more than fear or the sense of his own dignity that made him feel vulnerable, so he downed the prepared pálinka then filled his glass again because an empty glass always made him feel a little nervous. Then he lit another cigarette and set to making more notes. “Futaki slips carefully through the door. He waits outside a short time. Then he knocks and shouts something. He hurries back in. The Schmidts are still inside. The headmaster has gone out through the back carrying his trashcan. Mrs. Kráner sneaks around her gate, watching. I’m tired, I should sleep. What day is it?” He pushed his glasses up on his brow, put down his pencil and rubbed the red mark on the bridge of his nose. He could only see vague patches in the cataract of rain outside, the odd clear-then-blurred top of some tree when, somewhere under the constant thunder, he heard the agonized howling of dogs in the distance. “As if they were being tortured.” He saw dogs hanging by their feet in the lee of some obscure hut or shack, their noses being roasted by a depraved adolescent wielding matches: he paid close attention and made further notes. “It seems to be stopping . . . no, it has started again.” For minutes on end he could not tell whether he was really hearing howls of pain, or whether it was simply that his years of long, exhausting work had rendered him incapable of distinguishing between the general noise and ancient prehistoric screams that were somehow preserved in time (“The evidence of suffering does not disappear without trace,” he hopefully remarked) and now were being raised by the rain, like dust. Then, suddenly, he heard other noises: whimpers, wails and a stifled human sobbing, which — like the houses and trees that were solidifying into blotches — would sometimes rise clear of, or sink back into, the monotonous hum of the rain. “Cosmic wirtschaft,” he wrote in his notebook. “My hearing is going.” He looked out of the window, drained his glass, but this time forgot immediately to refill it. A great wave of heat passed through him, his brow and thick neck covered in sweat; he felt mildly dizzy and there was a pain, a kind of tightening about his heart. He did not find this at all surprising for ever since yesterday night, when he was woken from a brief, restless two hours of dreamless sleep by a nearby cry, he had been continuously drinking (the “capacious demijohn” at his right had only enough pálinka left for one more day), and furthermore, he had hardly eaten anything. He got up to relieve himself but, surveying the pile of rubbish towering before the door, he thought better of it. “Later. It’ll wait,” he said aloud but did not sit back down and took a few steps close to the table toward the far wall in case movement might help “the painful tightening.” The sweat was running in streams from his armpits down his fat flanks: he felt weak. The blanket slipped from his shoulders as he went but he lacked the strength to readjust it. He sat back in the armchair, filled another glass, thinking that might help, and he was right, a few minutes later he could breathe more easily and was sweating less. The rain beating at the glass made it more difficult to see anything so he decided to suspend his surveillance for a little while, knowing that he would not miss anything since he was attentive to “the slightest noise, the slightest rustle” and would notice it immediately, even those delicate noises that emanated from within, from his heart or his stomach. Soon he had fallen into an anxious sleep. The empty glass he had been holding in his hand slipped to the floor without breaking, his head slumped forward, saliva trickled from the side of his mouth. Everything seemed to have been waiting for just this moment. The place suddenly went dark as if someone had stood in front of the window: the colors of the ceiling, the door, the curtain, the window and the floor all deepened, the tuft of hair that formed the doctor’s forelock began to grow more rapidly as did the nails on his short, puffy fingers; the table and the chair both gave a creak and even the house sank a little deeper into the soil as part of the insidious revolt. The weeds at the foot of the wall at the back of the house began to spurt, the creased notebooks scattered here and there attempted to smooth themselves out with one or two sharp movements, the rafters in the roof groaned, the emboldened rats ran down the hall with a greater freedom. He woke dizzy, with a bad taste in his mouth. He didn’t know and could only guess at the time having forgotten to wind his waterproof, shock-proof, frost-proof, highly reliable “Rocket” wristwat
ch — and the small hand had just passed the eleven on the dial. The shirt he was wearing was wet through with sweat and made him feel cold, as though he was perishing, and his headache — though he couldn’t be sure of this — seemed to be concentrated at the back of his neck. He filled his glass and was surprised to note that he had misjudged the situation: there was not enough pálinka for a day, only for a couple of hours at the most. “I shall have to go into town,” he thought nervously. “I can refill the demijohn at Mopsz’s. But the damn bus is out of service! If only it would stop raining I could go on foot.” He looked out of the window and was annoyed to find that the rain had washed out the road. What was more, if the old road could not be used, then he could not set out on the metalled way because it might be tomorrow morning before he got there. He decided to eat something and postpone the decision. He opened another can and, leaning forward, began to spoon it into his mouth. He had just finished and was preparing to make new notes comparing the current width of the flooded ditches and traffic with their conditions at dawn, remarking on the differences, when he heard a noise at the entrance door. Somebody was fiddling with a key in the lock. The doctor put his notes away and leaned back in his chair, ill-tempered. “Hello, doctor,” said Mrs. Kráner, stopping on the threshold. “It’s only me.” She knew she had to wait and, sure enough, the doctor did not miss the opportunity to examine her face in the usual ruthless, slow, detailed manner. Mrs. Kráner bore this humbly without in the least understanding the procedure (“Let him gaze his fill, let him conduct his examination, if he enjoys it so much!” she used to say at home to her husband), then stepped forward as the doctor beckoned her in. “I’ve only come, cause, as you can see, we’ve got heavy rain, and, as I said to my husband at lunchtime, this will take time to clear, and then it’ll be snow next.” The doctor did not answer but looked sullenly in front of him. “I talked it over with my husband and we thought that since I can’t go anyway, as there is no bus till the spring, we should speak to the pub landlord because there’s a car there, and then we could bring a lot of things in one trip, enough even for two or three weeks, said my husband. Then, in the spring, we’ll think about what to do after that.” The doctor was breathing heavily. “So does that mean you can no longer do the job?” It seemed Mrs. Kráner was prepared for this question. “Of course not, I mean why wouldn’t I do it, you know me doctor, there’s been no problem ever, but as you can see for yourself, sir, there is no bus and when it’s raining like this, as the doctor knows, said my husband, he’ll understand, cause how am I going to get into town on foot, and it would be better for you too, sir, if Mopsz drove here, you could get so much more . . .” “Fine, Mrs. Krámer, you may go.” The woman turned towards the door. “Then you will talk to him, I mean the landlo — “ “I’ll speak to whomsoever I want to speak to,” the doctor thundered. Mrs. Kráner left but she had barely taken a few steps down the corridor when she quickly turned back. “Oh look, I forgot. The keys.” “What about the keys?” “Where should I put them?” “Put them anywhere you like.” Mrs. Kráner’s house was near the doctor’s so he could observe her for only a short time as she made her slow, painful way back over the cloying mud. He searched among his clutch of papers, found the notebook headed MRS. KRÁNER and jotted down: “K resigned. She can’t do it any more. I should ask the landlord. She had no problem walking in the rain last spring. She is up to no good. She was confused but not to be swerved from her purpose. She’s cooking something up. But what the devil is it?” In the course of the afternoon he read the rest of the notes he had made on her but it didn’t help: it might be that his suspicions were unfounded and all that was happening was that the woman has spent the whole day dreaming at home and now she was getting things confused . . . The doctor knew Mrs. Kráner’s kitchen of old, well remembered that narrow constantly overheated cubby-hole and knew that that stuffy, ill-smelling nook was a breeding ground for feeble, childish plans; that stupid, perfectly ridiculous desires sometimes caught her unaware there, drifting before her like steam from a saucepan. Clearly, that’s what must have happened now: steam had raised the lid of the pan. Then, as so many times before, would come the moment of bitter realization and Mrs. Kráner would rush around at breakneck speed to remedy that which she had ruined the previous day. The noise of the rain seemed to have grown a little fainter but then it pelted down again. Mrs. Kráner would be proved right: it really was the first great rain of the season. The doctor thought back to last year’s autumn and to those of earlier years and knew that this was how it would have to be; that, apart from a brief break of sunshine that lasted a few hours, or at most a day or two, it would pour down steadily, without a pause, right until the first frosts so that the roads would become impassable and they would be shut off from the outside world, from town and from the railways; that the constant rain would turn the soil into one enormous sea of mud, and the animals would vanish into woods the other side of the Szikes, into the narrow park of the Hochmeiss estate or into the overgrown park of Weinkheim Manor because the mud would kill off all forms of life, rot the vegetation and there would be nothing left, just the ankle-deep cart-tracks of the end of summer that had filled up with water up your boot tops, and these pools and puddles of water, as well as the nearby canal, would be covered over with frogspawn and reeds and tangled weeds that in the evening or early twilight, when the moon’s dead light reflected off them, would glitter all over the body of the land like a galaxy of tiny silvery blind eyes gazing up at the sky. Mrs. Halics passed before the window and crossed opposite him to the far side to rattle the window at Schmidt’s. A few minutes earlier he seemed to have heard snatches of conversation which led him to think that there must be some trouble with Halics again and that the lanky Mrs. Halics must be calling on Mrs. Schmidt for help. “Clearly, Halics must be drunk again. The woman is animatedly explaining something to Mrs. Schmidt who appears to be looking at her in astonishment or fear. I can’t see too well. The headmaster has appeared now, chasing the cat. Then he sets off toward the cultural center with a projector under his arm. The others are drifting that way too now, yes: there’s going to be film show.” He threw back another glass of pálinka and lit a cigarette. “What a business!” he muttered under his breath. It was getting toward evening so he rose to put the lamp on. Suddenly he felt extremely dizzy but was still capable of making his way over to the light switch. He lit the lamp but was incapable of taking a single step back. He stumbled over something, struck his head forcefully against the wall, and collapsed where he stood, right under the switch. When he recovered consciousness and finally succeeded in hauling himself upright the first thing he noticed was a little trickle of blood from his forehead. He had no idea how much time had passed since he lost consciousness. He returned to his usual place. “It seems I am very drunk,” he thought then drank quite a small measure of pálinka because he did not fancy a cigarette. He stared ahead of him with a somewhat foolish expression: recovery was proving difficult. He adjusted the blanket on his shoulders and looked out into the pitch darkness through the gap. Even though his senses were dulled by the pálinka he was aware that certain aches and pains were struggling to enter his consciousness, much as he was determined not to acknowledge them. “I have suffered a slight blow, that’s all.” He thought back to the conversation with Mrs. Kráner in the afternoon and tried to decide what to do next. He couldn’t set out now, in this weather, though his pálinka needed urgent replenishment. He did not want to think about how he would replace Mrs. Kráner — that was if she did not change her mind — since it was not only the problem of provisions but all those truly insignificant yet necessary little tasks round the house that would have to be addressed, not at all a simple matter, and that was why, for the time being, he concentrated on trying to work out a practical plan regarding what to do in the face of other unexpected events (tomorrow would have been the day for Mrs. Kráner to see the landlord) and get hold of enough drink to see him through until “a proper solution” could be found. Obvi
ously he had to speak with the landlord. But how could he send him a message? through whom? Taking into account his current condition, he did not want to even consider the possibility of setting out for the bar himself. Later, however, he thought it best not to leave the task to anyone else, since the landlord was bound to water the liquor and would later defend himself by claiming that he didn’t know that “the doctor was the customer.” He decided to wait a little, collect himself, and then to make his own way there. He tapped his brow a few times and dabbed at the wound with water from the jug on the table using his handkerchief. This did not relieve his headache in the slightest but he did not dare risk the whole enterprise by looking for medication. He tried, if not to sleep, then at least to snooze a while, but was obliged to keep his eyes open because of the terrible images that rushed in on him once they were closed. He used his feet to push out the ancient old genuine leather suitcase he kept under the table and pulled a few foreign magazines out of it. The magazines — bought at random, much like his books — came from the second-hand bookshop at Kisrománváros, the smaller Romanian borough in town, the one owned by the Swabian, Schwarzenfeld, who boasted of his Jewish ancestors, and who once a year, in the winter months when the tourist season was over and he closed the shop for lack of trade, would set off on a round of business trips to the greater and lesser communities of the area, at which time he never failed to visit the doctor in whom he was delighted to meet “a man of culture it was an honor to know.” The doctor paid no great heed to the names of the magazines preferring to look at the pictures in order — as now — to pass the time. He particularly enjoyed looking through photo spreads of the wars in Asia, at scenes that never seemed very distant or exotic to him, and which, he was convinced, were photographed somewhere nearby, to the extent that one or other face seemed so familiar he would spend a long, anxious time trying to identify it. He arranged and ranked the best pictures, and regular examination made their various pages familiar so he quickly found his favorites. There was one special picture — though the rank of favorites did change in due course — an aerial shot, that greatly appealed to him: an enormous, ragged procession winding over a desert-like terrain leaving behind them the ruins of an embattled town billowing smoke and flames, while ahead, waiting for them, there was only a large, spreading dark area like an admonitory blot. And what made the photograph particularly worthy of note was the equipment appropriate to a military observation post that — redundant at first sight — was just about visible in the bottom left-hand corner. He felt the picture was important enough to deserve close attention because it demonstrated with great confidence, in real depth, the “all but heroic history” of a perfectly conducted piece of research focused on essentials, research in which observer and observed were at an optimal distance from each other and where minuteness of observation was given particular emphasis, to the extent that he often imagined himself behind the lens, waiting for the precise moment when he might press the button on the camera with absolute certainty. Even now it was this picture he had picked up almost without thinking: he was familiar with it down to the most minute detail but every time he looked at it he lived in hope of discovering something he hadn’t yet noticed. However, despite wearing his glasses, it all looked a little blurry to him this time. He put the magazines away and took “one last nip” before setting out. He struggled to put on his fur-lined winter coat, folded the blankets and left the house, swaying a little. The cold fresh air hit him hard. He tapped his pocket to check he had his wallet and notebook, adjusted his wide-brimmed hat and started uncertainly in the direction of the mill. He could have chosen a shorter route to the bar but that would have meant passing first the Kráners’ then the Halics’s house, not to mention the fact that he was bound to bump into “some dumb ass” near the Cultural Center or the generator, someone who would detain him against his will and engage him in some crude or sly form of interrogation, disguised with so-called gratitude to satisfy the person’s repulsive curiosity. It was hard making progress in the mud and what was worse he could barely see his way in the darkness, but proceeding through the backyard of his house he found his way to the path that led to the mill and he was more or less familiar with that, though he hadn’t recovered his sense of balance so he swayed and tottered as he went, as a result of which it often happened that he miscalculated a step and bumped into a tree or stumbled over a low bush. He fought for breath, his chest heaving, and there was still that tight feeling around his heart he had endured since the afternoon. He walked faster to reach the mill as quickly as he could so that he might shelter from the rain, and he no longer tried to avoid the lurking puddles along the path, plowing through them ankle-deep if he had to. His boots were clogged with mud, his fur-lined coat was growing ever heavier. He shouldered open the stiff doors of the mill, sank down on a wooden chest and struggled for breath for several minutes. He could feel the blood pulsing through his neck, his legs were numb, his hands trembled. He was on the ground floor of the abandoned building, with two storeys above him. The silence was overwhelming. Ever since anything half-way useful had been removed from here, this vast, dark, dry hangar rang with its own emptiness: to the right of the door there were a few old fruit crates, an iron trough of uncertain function, and a crudely banged-together wooden box saying IN CASE OF FIRE without any sand in it. The doctor removed his boots, took off his socks and squeezed the water from them. He searched for a cigarette but the pack had soaked through and there was not one fit to smoke. The weak light that filtered through the open door was enough to see the floor and the boxes like patches of semi-dark distinguished from the greater darkness. He seemed to hear the scurrying of rats. “Rats? Here?” he marvelled and took a few steps forward into the deep core of the hangar. He put on his glasses and peered, blinking, at the dense darkness. But there was no noise now, so he went back for his hat, socks and boots and put them on. He tried to strike a match by rubbing it against the lining of his coat. It worked and, by its briefly flickering light, he could make out the bottom of the stairs rising three or four yards away by the far wall. For no particular reason he took a few hesitant steps up them. But the match soon burned down and he had neither reason nor desire to repeat the exercise. He stood for a moment in the darkness, felt for the wall, and would have made his way back down to set out for the road to the bar when he heard a quite faint noise. “It must be rats after all.” The scurrying sound seemed to be coming from a long way off, somewhere at the very top of the building. He put his hand to the wall again and, tapping it, began to climb the stairs once more, but he had only climbed a few steps when the noise grew louder. “That’s not rats. It’s like brushwood snapping.” Having reached the first turning of the stair, the noise, though low, was now clearly that of snatches of conversation. Right at the back of the middle storey, about twenty to twenty-five meters away from the stiff statue-like figure of the listening doctor, two girls were sitting on the floor around a flickering brushwood fire. The fire brought their features into sharp relief and produced great vibrating shadows on the high ceiling. The girls were clearly involved in some deep conversation, looking not at each other but into the dancing flames rising from the glowing brushwood. “What are you doing here?” the doctor asked and moved towards them. They leapt up in fright but then one of them gave a relieved laugh. “Oh, is that you, doctor?” The doctor joined them by the fire and sat down. “I’ll warm myself a bit,” he said. “That’s if you don’t mind.” The two girls sat down with him, their legs beneath them and giggled quietly. “I don’t suppose you have a cigarette?” asked the doctor, not looking up from the fire. “Mine have turned to sponge in the rain.” “Of course, take one,” answered one of them. “It’s there, by your feet, next to you.” The doctor lit it and slowly blew out the smoke. “The rain, you know,” one of the girls explained. “It’s what Mari and I were grumbling about just now: no work alas, business is bad” — she gave a hoarse laugh — “so, you know, we’re stuck here.” The doctor turned to warm hi
s side. He had not met the two Horgos girls since he had dismissed the elder one. He knew they spent the day at the mill, indifferently waiting for a “customer” to appear or for the landlord to summon them. They rarely ventured onto the estate. “We didn’t think it worthwhile to wait,” the elder Horgos girl continued. “There are days, you know, when they turn up one after the other, and other days when there’s no visitors, nothing happens and we just sit here. There are times when we almost leap on each other, the two of us, it’s so cold. And it’s scary being here by ourselves. . . .” The younger Horgos girl gave a raucous laugh. “Oh we’re so scared!” and lisped, like a little girl, “it’s horrible here, just the two of us.” This elicited a brief shriek from both of them. “May I take another cigarette?” the doctor grumbled. “Take one, of course you may take one, why should I say no, especially to you?!” The younger one was falling about with still more laughter and, imitating her sister’s voice, repeated, “Why should I say no, especially to you! That’s good, that’s well said!” Eventually they stopped their giggling and stared, exhausted, into the fire. The doctor was enjoying the heat and thought to stay a little longer, to dry out and warm up, then pull himself together and set out for the bar. He stared dozily into the fire, faintly whistling as he breathed in and out. The elder Horgos girl broke the silence. Her voice was tired, hoarse and bitter. “You know, I am over twenty now, and she will soon be twenty herself. When I think about it — and that’s what we were talking about just now when you turned up — I wonder where all this is leading us. A girl gets fed up. Have you any idea how much we can put away in savings? Can you imagine?! Ah, I could kill people sometimes!” The doctor gazed at the fire in silence. The younger Horgos girl stared indifferently straight ahead of her: her legs were spread and she was leaning back on her hands, nodding. “We have to support the little criminal, the idiot child Esti, not to metion mother, though she can’t do much apart from complain about this or that, or ask where we have stowed the money, and demand we give her the money, the money this and the money that — and what’s with them all!? Believe me, they are quite capable of robbing us of our last pair of panties! And as for us finally going into town and leaving this filthy hole, if you could only have heard the abuse hurled at us! What on earth did we think we were doing, blah, blah, blah? . . . The fact is we are utterly fed up with this life, isn’t that right, Mari, haven’t we had enough of it?” The younger Horgos waved a bored hand. “Forget it! Don’t rock the boat! You either go or stay! You can’t say anyone is keeping you here.” Her older sister immediately rounded on her. “Yes, you’d like it if I pissed off, wouldn’t you? You’d do all right here by yourself! Well, that’s exactly why I’m not going! If I go, you go too!” Baby Horgos made an ugly face, “OK, but don’t moan so much, you’ll make me cry already!” Horgos the elder had a reply ready but could not get to the end of it because her words were lost in a volley of throaty coughing. “No sweat, Mari, there’ll be cash enough here today, cash by the sack full!” she broke the silence. “Just see what’s going to happen here pretty soon, just see if I’m not right!” The other turned to her, annoyed. “They should have been here ages ago. Something doesn’t smell right about this, that’s my feeling.” “Aah, leave off. Don’t bother your head about it. I know Kráner and all the rest. He’ll be here right enough, panting and chasing tail, the same as ever.” “You don’t imagine he’s going to cough up the lot? All that money?” The doctor raised his head. “What money?” he asked. The elder Horgos made an impatient gesture with her hand. “Forget it, doc, just sit there and make yourself warm, and don’t pay any attention to us.” So he sat a while longer then begged two more cigarettes and a dry match and started down the stairs. He got to the door without any trouble: the rain was slanting in through the gap. His headache was a little better and he no longer felt dizzy in the slightest, there was only the tightness in his chest that didn’t want to go away. His feet quickly grew accustomed to the dark and felt perfectly at home knowing which way to go along the path. He made rapid progress in view of his condition, only rarely brushing against a branch or some shrub; so he pressed forward, his head held to one side so the rain wouldn’t beat at it so hard. He stopped for a couple of minutes under the eaves of the shed before the weighbridge but soon went on in a fury, silence and darkness before and behind him. He cursed Mrs. Kráner aloud and dreamed up various forms of revenge all of which he immediately forgot. He was tired again and there were moments he felt he simply had to sit down somewhere or else he would collapse. He turned down the metalled road that led to the bar and decided not to stop until he’d got there. “It’s a hundred steps no more, that’s all that remain,” he chivvied himself. There was a hopeful light filtering from the bar door and through its tiny window, the one single point in the darkness to guide him. He was ridiculously close now yet it seemed the filtered light was not getting any closer but, rather, moving away from him. “It’s nothing, it will pass, I’m just not feeling well,” he declared and stopped for a moment. He looked up at the sky and the gale slammed a fistful of rain into his face: what he needed more than anything right now was help. But the weakness that suddenly overcame him left just as suddenly. He turned off the metalled roadway and there he was, right in front of the bar door, when a faint voice below him called out: “Mr. Doctor!” It was the youngest of the Horgos children, little Esti, clinging to his coat. Her straw-blonde hair and her cardigan hanging down to her ankles were completely soaked through. She hung her head but carried on clinging to him as though she were not doing it just to amuse herself. “Is that you, little Esti? What do you want?” The little girl made no reply. “What are you doing out here at this hour of the night?” The doctor was shocked for a moment then tried impatiently to free himself, but little Esti clung on to him as though her life depended on it and would not let him go. “Let go of me! What’s the matter with you! Where’s your mother?!” The doctor seized the girl who suddenly pulled her hand away only to grab hold of his sleeve and to continue standing there in silence, looking down at the ground. The doctor nervously struck her on the arm to free himself but stumbled on the mud scraper and, however he waved his arms, finished up full length in the mud. The little girl was frightened and ran to the bar window, watching him, ready to run as the vast body rose and moved towards her. “Come here. Come here at once!” Esti leaned against the windowsill then pushed away and ran off down the metalled road on little duck feet. “That’s all I need!” the doctor muttered furiously to himself, then shouted after the little girl. “That’s all I needed! Where are you rushing off to?! Stop now, stop! Come back here at once!” He stood before the bar door not knowing what to do, to go about his errand or to go after the child. “Her mother is in there drinking, her sisters are whoring at the mill, her brother, well . . . who knows which store he is robbing in town right at this minute, and she is running around in the rain with only a thin dress on . . . the sky should fall in on the lot of them!” He stepped onto the metalled road and shouted out in the darkness. “Esti! I won’t harm you! Have you gone mad?! Come back here at once!” There was no answer. He set off after her and cursed himself for leaving his house in the first place. He was soaked to the skin, he wasn’t feeling well anyway, and now this half-wit clinging child! . . . He felt too much had happened to him since he stepped out of his home and that everything was now mixed up in his head. Bitterly, he decided that all the order he had patiently, painstakingly constructed over the years was proving highly fragile, and it gave him even more pain to realize that he himself — despite his big strong constitution — was also on the verge of collapse: look, just one short walk to the bar (“And I took a rest too!”) which really was no great distance, and here he was, out of breath, tight in the chest, his legs weak and all strength gone from his body. And the worst thing was that he had been rushing round mindlessly, swept this way and that without the faintest idea why he should be pelting like a lunatic after a child down the metalled road in the driving rain. He shou
ted one last time in the direction the child might have been going then stopped, furious, admitting he’d never catch her anyway. It was high time he pulled himself together. He turned back and was astounded to observe that he seemed to have moved a long way from the bar. He started toward it but after a couple of steps the whole world went dark in an instant and he felt his legs sliding in the mud; for a brief moment he was aware that he was falling to the ground and rolling somewhere, then, finally, he lost consciousness. It took him a lot of effort and a long time to come to himself. He couldn’t remember how he had got here. His mouth was full of mud and the earthy taste suddenly made him feel sick. His coat too was covered in mud, his legs had stiffened because of the cold and damp but curiously enough the three cigarettes he had begged from the Horgos girls, that he was firmly gripping in his fist so they should not get wet, were perfectly intact. He quickly tucked them back in his pocket and tried to stand up. His legs, however, kept slipping on the sides of the muddy ditch and it was only after a sustained effort that he managed to get back on the proper road. “My heart! My heart!” The thought flashed through his mind and he grabbed at his chest in fear. He felt extremely weak and he knew he had to get to the hospital as quickly as he could. But the rain made that impossible: ever new waves of it were beating down at an angle to the road with unrelenting power. “I must rest. Find a tree . . . or go on to the bar? No, I have to rest somewhere.” He left the road and took shelter under a nearby old acacia. He drew his legs under him so he shouldn’t have to sit directly on the ground. He tried hard not to think about anything, but stared stiffly ahead of him. A few minutes passed like this, or it might have been hours, he couldn’t tell. In the east, the horizon was slowly brightening. The doctor watched the light’s ruthless progress across the field, his spirit broken but still nursing some vague hope. The light gave him hope but he was afraid of it too. He would have loved to be lying down in a warm, friendly room, under the tender gaze of pale-skinned young nurses, with a bowl of hot soup before him, spooning it into his mouth, then turning to the wall. He noticed three figures proceeding down the road parallel to the road-sweeper’s house. They were a long way off, hopelessly far off, he couldn’t hear them, only see them, but he could tell that the smallest figure, a child, was passionately explaining something to one of them, while the other adult followed a few strides behind. When they finally came level with him he recognized them: he tried crying out but the wind must have blown his voice away because they took no notice at all but continued on their way to the bar. By the time he started to wonder at seeing these two big-time rogues, people he thought were dead, right in front of him, he had forgotten it all: his leg began to hurt with a sharp pain and his throat was dry. Morning found him on the road heading for town. He had no desire to turn back to the bar. He reeled rather than walked, full of confused thoughts, frightened by voices that broke every so often above him. A crowd of rooks seemed to be hanging around, following him; it distinctly looked like they were on his tracks, never letting him out of their sight. By the afternoon, when he reached the fork to Elek he didn’t have enough strength to get up on the cart, it was left to the homeward-bound Kelemen to haul him onto the thoroughly wet straw behind the seat. He felt light headed and the admonitory words of the driver kept echoing through his skull: “Doctor, sir, you shouldn’t have! You really shouldn’t have!”

 

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