The Melancholy of Resistance (14 page)

presence (‘… no, you’re mistaken, Mr Harrer, this is precisely where I should be … !’). The square was now lit by hundreds of little fires, and here and there groups of twenty or thirty freezing bodies were warming themselves at the flames, which leapt higher and higher, and since this made it easier to pass through them and to see everything a little more clearly, it took Valuska only a few unobstructed minutes to take stock of the scene before him. A few minutes without obstruction perhaps, but this ‘thorough examination’ brought no immediate enlightenment as to the sheer size of the crowd (what detail was he supposed to look out for if everything was as before?) and observing these apparently peaceful groups loitering about the fires, rubbing their hands, he felt there was nothing particularly threatening here, not even in ‘the atmosphere’. ‘No one is moving, the mood seems fine,’ he tried the words out, but they rang ever more false, and as they did so, the nature of his mission appeared ever more painful. Observing these people in secret, walking among them as if he were some enemy, suspecting them of unnamed felonies and murders, taking their most innocent gestures as evidence of an evil intent—Valuska immediately realized that he was incapable of carrying this programme through. If, in his previous state of fright, he had found the woman’s sobering power a source of strength, then a few minutes among these people gathered around the friendly warmth of bonfires—resulting in a curious and sudden sense of domesticity—relieved him of the minor but embarrassing burden of misunderstanding, a misunderstanding shared by the head cook, Nadabán and his friends and Mrs Eszter herself, implying that the cure for ‘anxiety induced by a need for a rational explanation’ (and indeed his anxiety concerning Mr Eszter too) might be found in the circus and its long-suffering audience. The undoubtedly mysterious circus and the mysteriously loyal audience, the entire mystery, Valuska admitted to himself as the vision grew clearer, might have a simple and perfectly obvious explanation. He joined a group by one of the fires but the silence of his companions as they hung their heads staring at the flames or occasionally stole a glance in the direction of the circus wagon no longer perturbed him because he clearly understood that the mystery consisted of nothing but the whale, the first sight of the whale that he himself had seen and experienced that very morning. Was it so strange, he thought as he gazed about him with a smile on his face—and he would happily have hugged every single one of them in his relief—that everyone here had been as captivated as he was by the extraordinary creature? Was it any wonder that, deep down inside themselves, they believed it might be worth waiting on some extraordinary event in its proximity? He was so delighted to feel ‘the scales falling from his eyes’, he wanted to share the experience, and therefore declared in conspiratorial tones to those around him that he found ‘the endless wealth of nature’ overwhelming, quite overwhelming, he said, adding that such a sign, on a day like this, pointed to ‘the apparently lost unity of things’—then, not waiting for a reply, he waved goodbye to the others and continued on his way among the crowd. His first impulse was to rush back with the news, but according to his instructions he was to survey the whale too (‘The monster … !’ he smiled at the fearful epithet), and so, in order that his account to the committee should be as full as possible, he determined to steal another quick glance at ‘the Emissary of the One’ if he could, and not to leave his companions in the lurch this evening, an evening that had begun so badly but now promised to end so well. The wagon was open and they hadn’t yet put the boards across, so he couldn’t resist the possibility of stepping in rather than simply having a ‘quick peek’. Now that he was alone in looking at it, the body of the whale, illuminated by only two flickering light bulbs and resting as it did between enormous tin walls in the freezing cold outside, appeared bigger and more terrifying than ever, but he was no longer scared of it, in fact, apart from a respectful fascination, he felt as if the intervening events between their first encounter and the present one had facilitated a strange, confidential, almost courteous relationship between the two of them, and he was about to give it a humorous ticking off as he was leaving (‘See how much trouble you’ve caused, even though you’ve long been unable to harm anyone …’) when he heard unexpected if indistinct voices somewhere deep in the wagon. He thought he recognized the voices, and, as it soon turned out, he was not mistaken, for having reached the door at the back which, as he had earlier surmised, led to the area reserved for accommodation, by putting his ear to the tin wall he could begin to pick out a few sentences (‘… I engaged him to show himself, not to spin stupid stories. I won’t let him out. Turn him round! …) that were most certainly spoken by the director. The sounds he heard after that—a low even grumbling followed by a kind of sharp and sudden chirrup—were perfectly incomprehensible at first and it took some time for him to realize that the director was not conducting a monologue with caged birds and bears but was expressly addressing someone, that the strange grumblings and chirrupings must in fact have been produced by human beings, the first of which was even now grumbling in rather broken Hungarian to the effect that, ‘That’s what he says, and no one can stop him whatever they do. And he doesn’t understand what you are saying, Mr Director, sir …’ Having got so far, it was clear to Valuska that he had found himself in the position of uninvited witness (furthermore, one ever less capable of suppressing his curiosity) to a discussion or, more likely, argument, though what the subject of the argument was, or whom the director was addressing in that apparently tense atmosphere (Tell him,’ he was just saying, ‘I am not willing to risk the reputation of the company again. That last time was positively the last …’), was not quite clear, and even if he did succeed in distinguishing the new bout of grumbling from the concomitant chirruping, and interpreting the bit of vaguely Hungarian grumbling that followed (‘He says he doesn’t recognize a superior authority. And that the director couldn’t seriously think he would …’), he still couldn’t tell who was speaking or how many conspirators there were in that hidden room, at least not until the next snatch of conversation. ‘Would you please get it through into that infant’s thick skull,’ the director exclaimed, losing his temper—and being able to smell his cigar Valuska could picture the smoke snaking from his lips—‘that I will not let him out, and even if, God knows, I did let him out he couldn’t say a word. And you would not act as his interpreter. You are to remain here. I will take him out. Otherwise he’s fired. In fact you’re both fired.’ Recognizing the unmistakably threatening tone of that remark it suddenly dawned on Valuska not only that this grumbling and chirruping—which were once again succeeding each other in that order and which reminded him of nothing he had ever heard before—were linguistically related and that there must therefore be two other people in that, as he imagined, narrow if not altogether uncomfortable bedroom (the director’s person had radiated a likely need for comfort) beside the man with the sonorous and commanding voice, but that one of the two, the grumbler, must be the ticket collector with the squashed nose he had seen that morning. The very name he seemed to be stuck with, the ‘factotum’, made this all the more likely, and once he had decided this, one actor in this increasingly terrifying though enlightening conversation—which was clearly of an intimate or, so to speak, business nature—one particular member of this, as all the circumstances appeared to suggest, two-person company (something told Valuska that he had stumbled on the place where all his questions would be answered once the subject of the conversation was revealed, as it soon would be) became practically visible, and he could imagine him as clearly as if he were standing there, watching that enormous body behind the tin door as it calmly mediated between the two passionately opposing parties, between a strange and apparently inarticulate language and the language of the director. What that language was, who it was the factotum was acting as interpreter for—in other words, working out who the third person in that sealed domestic space was—lay, for now, beyond Valuska’s capabilities to discover, since neither the response (which in the giant’s grumbling translation came out as, ‘He says he’s wants me with him because he’s afraid the director might drop him’) nor the cigar smoker’s sharp interjection (‘Tell him I resent his impudence!’) was of any great help. Not only did it not help but it further confused him, since the suggestion that this so far unseen member of the whale’s entourage (not just unseen, but apparently, deliberately concealed) had to be carried (how, on one’s lap?), and that he had been hired as an exhibit which was not going to be put on exhibition, made the problem a particularly hard one to solve in any convincing way; furthermore, the imperious reaction (‘He says that is ridiculous, because it’s common knowledge he has a following out there. His followers will not forget who he is. No ordinary force can hold him, he has a magnetic power’) indicated ever more clearly that the awe-inspiring and apparently omnipotent director was in a very tight corner, faced as he was by a superior being. ‘Sheer insolence!’ the director cried, openly betraying his dependency and helplessness, and the ever more nervous witness behind the door felt a tremor pass through him, thinking that if nothing else then the terrifying power of this great booming voice must surely put an end to the argument. ‘His magnetic power,’ the voice rumbled mockingly, ‘is a disfigurement! He is an aberration, I’ll say it slowly so you can understand it, an ab-ber-ray-shun, who—and he knows this as well as I do—has no knowledge or power. The title of prince,’ the voice rang with contempt, ‘was one I bestowed on him as a business decision! Tell him that I invented him! And that out of the two of us, I alone have the faintest conception of the world about which he piles lie upon outrageous lie, whose mob he agitates!!’ ‘He says his public is out there waiting,’ came the answer, ‘and they are growing impatient. To them he is The Prince’. ‘All right,’ screamed the director, ‘he is fired!!!’ Though through this exchange, which—because of the mystery surrounding the actors and the subject of their argument—was frightening enough in itself, Valuska had all but turned to stone behind the tin partition, it was only now that terror really seized him. He felt that those imposing words from ‘aberration’ through to ‘agitates’, from ‘magnetic power’ through to ‘mob’, were sweeping him towards some ominous shore where everything he had failed to understand these last few hours, in fact every apparently meaningless phenomenon of the last few months, would suddenly resolve itself into a single picture with one dreadful outline, putting an end to ignorant certainties (such as the belief that the broken glass on the floors of the Komló, the friendly hand that seemed to manacle him in its grip, the anxious conference in Honvéd Square, and the patient waiting of the crowd in the market square had, and could have, nothing to do with each other), and that because of these ‘imposing words’ the blurred image created in his mind by the sum of his confused impressions and experiences had, like a landscape from which the fog had started to lift, begun the irreversible process of clearing, thereby suggesting the possibility that all these phenomena were symptoms of, or pointed to, a single event that meant ‘big trouble’. At this stage of hostilities it was too early to say what precisely that might be, but he suspected that even if he were to offer resistance, he would know soon enough; and he did resist it as though it were possible to place obstacles in its path, and defended himself as if this offered some hope of avoiding it, of suppressing the instinct which up till now had detected no obvious connection between the crowds that had arrived together with the circus and the local people’s hysterical sense of foreboding. That hope, however, was growing fainter by the minute, for the director’s furious outburst had drawn together the various strands of his experience so far, from the head cook’s words to the depressing conviction of Nadabán and his friends, from the memorable unrest of the crowd stiff with cold to the possibilities suggested by the so-called ‘monster’, and this consonance suggested something terrifying, if only because he was forced to admit that when he had dismissed, and indeed smiled at, local people’s apprehensions, apprehensions that seemed to have grown particularly acute in the last twenty-four hours, they were right and he was wrong. From the moment the thought had first occurred to him during the murmur of protest following the director’s notable public address, Valuska had successfully avoided drawing the appropriate conclusions and had dismissed any possibility that all the available facts supported the dark forebodings of the locals; through the time in Honvéd Square when he recognized that somewhere at the back of his own anxieties about Mr Eszter there lurked the suspicion that the general apprehension ‘had taken hold of him too on the way’, down to the present moment when he had lost even the capacity to move away from the door, he was forced to recognize that the relaxation of tension that used to follow waves of fear would not now occur, that the shadow of significance that underlay these phenomena ultimately was their true significance, that there would, in short, be no escape from the feeling of inevitability about what was happening here. ‘Fine, he says,’ so the battle beyond the door continued. ‘He’ll go freelance from now. He will part company from the director and take no further interest in the whale. And he’s taking me with him.’ ‘You?!’ ‘I’ll go,’ answered the factotum indifferently, ‘when he says so. He means money. The director is poor. To the director The Prince means money.’ ‘Don’t you give me that Prince stuff too!’ the director turned on the interpreter, then, after a moment, he added: ‘Tell him I don’t like
arguing. I’ll let him out on one small condition. That he keeps his mouth shut. Not a word. He is to be as silent as the grave.’ The weary tone of that voice, the early thunder of which had been reduced to a groan of resignation, left him in no doubt that the director had suffered a defeat, and since Valuska knew the cause in which he had been defeated and understood that there was something about the maker of that chirruping sound that the out-manoeuvred master was wanting, at all costs, to frustrate, something that would now inevitably follow with an instant and blinding clarity, he felt very much like a cat stuck in the middle of the road, paralysed by the headlights of an onrushing vehicle: he couldn’t move a muscle but stared, numb and helpless, at the inner door of the freezing truck. ‘He says,’ the voice of the interpreter continued, ‘there will be no conditions. The director gets the money, The Prince gets his followers. Everything has a price. There’s no point in arguing.’ ‘If his rabble destroy the towns they pass through,’ the director argued, exhausted, ‘there will be nowhere left for him to go after a while. Translate that.’ ‘He says,’ came the immediate answer, ‘that he has no wish to go anywhere at any time. It is always the director who carries him. And, he says, he doesn’t understand what you mean “after a while”. There’s no time left even now. Unlike the director, he believes that everything has its own individual significance. The significance is in the elements not in the whole as the director imagines.’ ‘I don’t imagine anything,’ the director answered after a long silence. ‘What I do know is that if he rouses the crowd rather than calming it, they will tear this town to pieces.’ ‘A town built on lies will continue to be a town built on lies,’ the factotum spoke for the more agitated chirruping. ‘What they do and what they will do are both based on lies and false pride. What they think and what they will think are equally ridiculous. They think because they are frightened. Fear is ignorance. He says he likes it when things fall to pieces. Ruin comprises every form of making: lies and false pride are like oxygen in the ice. Making is half: ruin is everything. The director is frightened and doesn’t understand: his followers are not frightened and do understand.’ ‘Please inform him,’ the director snapped back, ‘that as far as I am concerned his prophecies are mere blather, he can sell them to the mob but not to me. And tell him, while you’re at it, that I refuse to listen to him any longer, that I will have nothing more to do with him, will take no responsibility for his actions, and that from this moment, gentlemen, you are free to do as you please … If you ask me though,’ he added, clearing his throat for emphasis, ‘you would do better to tuck your princeling up in bed, give him a double dose of cream, then take your books out and learn to speak Hungarian properly.’ ‘The Prince is shouting,’ the factotum remarked indifferently above the now continuous, almost hysterical chirruping, not even bothering to address his boss directly. ‘He says, he is always free in himself. His position is between things. And in between things he sees that he is himself the sum of things. And what things add up to is ruin, nothing but ruin. To his followers he is “The Prince” but in his own view he is the prince of princes. Only he can see the whole, he says, because he can see there is no whole. And for The Prince this is how things must be … as they must always be … he must see with his own eyes. His followers will wreak havoc because they understand his vision perfectly. His followers understand that all things are false pride, but don’t know why. The Prince knows: it is because the whole does not exist. The director cannot grasp this, the director is in his way. The Prince is bored with him; he is going out.’ The passionate chirruping ceased along with the bear-like grumbling, nor did the director have anything more to say, but even if he had Valuska wouldn’t have heard it, because ever since those last words died away he had been backing away, much as his ears were—metaphorically—backing away from the words, in fact he backed away so far that he bumped into the propped-up snout of the whale. Then somehow everything around him was in motion: the truck slipped from under him, people were running beside him, and this great sense of rushing stopped only when he realized, in the middle of the crowd, that his new friend—to whom he wanted to reveal that what they were going to be asked to undertake was dreadful and that the words they were waiting to hear, even if they were what they had been waiting for all this time, should under no circumstances be listened to—was nowhere to be found. Was nowhere to be found because the immense burden of his discovery had suddenly descended on him, crushing and destroying in minutes every idea he had formed about the circus, the afternoon and everything else that had happened to him that day, because his head was spinning, his shoulders were aching and he was cold and could no longer see faces but merely the blurred shapes of bodies. He ran between the bonfires but, being racked with cramps, his words (‘deception’ … ‘evil’ … ‘shame’) came out in such a breathless and choking manner as to be practically incomprehensible; incapable of helping himself he persisted in trying to help others, a doomed enterprise, for while he was aware that the sum of his knowledge—after an initial period of ignorance and credulity—had suddenly equalled and exceeded theirs, he also knew that the mere existence of The Prince guaranteed that whatever he wanted to do, there was nothing to be done. ‘There’s something terrible going on,’ he wanted to say but couldn’t get the words out and was quite incapable of deciding where to go with this information. Mr Eszter was his first thought and he set off towards the avenue, but suddenly changed his mind and turned back, only to stop a few yards later as if realizing that his first course was, after all, the wisest. And though events had slowed down to this point, suddenly everything began rushing once more: the lights of the bonfires were spinning round him, people were running again, and even while trying to avoid them he noticed that a curious silence had descended on the square; he couldn’t hear anything except his own hectic breathing, which rose loudly and powerfully from inside him: it was like leaning close to a millwheel in motion. He found himself in Honvéd Square and the next moment he was knocking on the woman’s door, but however often he repeated it to himself before entering, however often he actually pronounced the words (‘There’s something terrible going on, Mrs Eszter! Mrs Eszter, there’s something terrible going on out there!’) he failed to attract the attention of either the hostess or her guests. They didn’t seem to understand him. ‘It was the so-called monster, wasn’t it? It frightened you, is that right?’ the woman asked him with a self-confident smile, and when he nodded back at her, wide-eyed with panic, she simply sighed, ‘Not surprising. Not surprising!’ her confident smile readily giving way to a more troubled look, and having led the vaguely protesting Valuska to the one unoccupied stool and pushed him forcefully on to it, she attempted to calm him by telling him how ‘even our little circle of friends here was not exactly immune to anxiety until Mr Harrer finally appeared with his good news’, and that meant that Valuska could relieve his mind somewhat for (‘Thank God!’) it was certain that the troublesome company would be leaving town within the hour, whale and prince and all. But Valuska shook his head vehemently, leapt from his seat and repeated the sentence that had been ringing in his head all this time, then attempted as best he could to explain ‘as clearly as possible’ how he had inadvertently been witness to an intense argument which proved without the shadow of a doubt that The Prince was not about to leave. ‘Things had moved on,’ said the woman, pushing the rather unwilling Valuska back on to his seat, and leaning on his shoulder with her left hand so as to improve his perception of matters—she understood why the mere presence of the criminal referred to as The Prince should have so discomposed him, it was because, ‘If I am not mistaken,’ she added softly with a superior smile, ‘you have really only just grasped the core of the problem.’ She understood perfectly, their indomitable hostess continued, raising her voice so everyone should hear her (Valuska was unable to move for the weight of her hand on his shoulder); she understood and, since she too had had the same experience, it was no mystery to her what a person might feel when confronted with the true nature of the masked circus freak for the first time. ‘Only half an hour ago,’ Mrs Eszter’s roar rang through the small room, ‘we were given every reason to believe that the plans of this creature, this renegade hireling of the circus management, or as the unimpeachable director himself put it, in Mr Harrer’s report, this “viper in our bosom”, would be realized and there was nothing anyone could do about it, and at that point we had every reason to think it was so, but now, equally, we have every reason to believe the opposite, for since then the management, newly aware of its responsibilities, has decided on a course of effective intervention and will shortly free us of this demonic presence. Thanks to Mr Harrer’s good offices,’ Mrs Eszter continued passionately, almost transfigured, her words not really aimed at the company, but at reinforcing the idea of her own unquestionable significance, ‘we know what lurks behind the mystery of what we may boldly admit is the mortally frightening rag-bag horde that threatens us and the even more extraordinary company they follow, and since, for the most part, we no longer have anything to fear, our role now being simply to wait for news of the circus’s imminent departure, I suggest we should stop exacerbating the sense of panic in the way that you,’ she smiled down on Valuska, ‘so pathetically are doing, and instead consider, all of us, our future course of action, for after what has happened here we cannot help but draw,’ and here she glared at the mayor hunched up in the corner, ‘the appropriate conclusions. I don’t by any means suggest that we are capable of resolving all the issues here and now,’ Mrs Eszter shook her head, ‘no, of course, it would be wrong to suggest that; nevertheless, events having fortunately sorted themselves out, we may at least conclude that the town, which in most regards seems to be suffering under some curse’ (‘The curse of indecision!’ Mrs Eszter’s old acquaintance, Harrer, cried out) ‘cannot be governed in the old way any more!’ This speech, which clearly had begun before Valuska arrived and whose proud rhetorical heights and sound sense were clearly appreciated by the powerful speaker herself, a speech that was formal yet exerted its own spell of sheer logic, had undoubtedly reached a climax, and since Mrs Eszter, her eyes full of triumph, was satisfied with its effect, it now came to end. The mayor, his eyes fixed on a spot in front of him with a bewildered expression, was vigorously nodding in support, but his whole mien showed he hadn’t stopped vacillating between the desired state of relief and all-consuming anxiety. The views of the chief of police could clearly be assumed, though for the moment he was not in a position to give them: his head back, his mouth wide open, he was still sleeping the sleep of the just on the bed, and this was the only thing that prevented him from granting his assent to the foregoing line of argument of which he undoubtedly approved. So the one person who remained capable of both speaking and doing, who wholeheartedly approved of the ‘stirring and cogent speech’ (if his heart and eyes could speak they would have approved even more loudly) and could in any case proclaim himself an unconditional and almost fanatical admirer of Mrs Eszter’s, was Harrer, the bringer of good news, who stood before them flushed and confused, his fat face blotchy with emotion as if he could still not adjust to being the centre of the attention, awarded to him on the strength of his role in events. He sat under the coat hanger, his knees firmly clamped together, with the sardine tin which served as an ashtray in one hand, the other continually flicking the tiny amounts of accumulated ash from his cigarette into it as if he were afraid that at any moment a grain or two of ash might fall on to the freshly swept floor; and so he puffed and flicked, puffed and flicked, and when he thought he could safely venture it without engaging her gaze, he glanced up at Mrs Eszter from under lowered lids, then quickly looked away and flicked his cigarette once more. It was apparent though that while seeming to avoid it, eye-contact was precisely what he was seeking; that he desired the sooner-or-later-inevitable clash of eyes; that, like all guilty parties, he would give anything to be able to summon up the courage to look the judge straight in the face; indeed, he gave a most convincing impression of someone groaning under the weight of a hitherto un-revealed act of darkness he was desperately anxious to redeem, something that, for him, mattered a great deal more than the circumstances currently prevailing in the market square—a thing that led him ‘wholeheartedly to approve’ of anything Mrs Eszter might say. No wonder then that in the silence that followed her last statement, he who had fed so intensely on her words should now be left clearly hungering for more, nor that when the mayor attempted to muddy the clear picture drawn by Mrs Eszter with some fussy point of order, he should regard this not so much as a questioning of his own veracity but as a crude insult to the dignity of their hostess and leap to his feet, cigarette in hand, forgetting the difference in their rank in the moment of his outrage, and make an unambiguous gesture ordering the mayor to shut up. ‘But,’ the mayor was saying, nervously passing his hand from where it had been massaging his brow across his bald pate right down to the nape of his neck, ‘what if this so-called “prince” should change his mind and stay here! He can say whatever he likes to Harrer but that doesn’t necessarily bind him. Who knows what we’re up against? Have we not acted too hastily? The only thing that bothers me is that we might—with all due respect—have sounded the retreat a little too early, too suddenly … !’ ‘The message,’ Mrs Eszter replied with due severity—and since Valuska was trying