The Melancholy of Resistance (3 page)

heavily built and bewhiskered man with an indifferent expression on his face, wearing only a vest on top, with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, who—once he noticed her on the pavement—pulled a face and slowly raised his right hand from the wheel as if to greet the gaping figure outside. All this was highly unusual (to crown it all, it must have been rather overheated in the cabin for the mountain of flesh behind the wheel to feel so warm), and the more she kept glancing back at the vehicle as she moved away, the more exotic a monster did it seem, encapsulating in its appearance all that life had so recently thrown at her: the past, it seemed to say, was no longer what it had been but was crawling remorselessly ahead below the windows of unsuspecting people. From this moment she was convinced she was in the grip of a terrible nightmare, only there was no waking from this one: no, she was quite certain that it was reality, only more so; furthermore she realized that the chilling events in which she had been participant or to which she had been witness (the appearance of the phantasmagorical vehicle, the violence in Erdélyi Sándor Road, the lights going off with all the precision of an explosive device, the inhuman rabble in the station forecourt, and above all this, dominating everything, the cold unremitting stare of the figure in the broadcloth coat) were not merely the oppressive creations of her ever-troubled imagination, but part of a scheme so co-ordinated, so precise, that there could be no doubt of their purpose. At the same time she was constrained to make every effort to reject such an extraordinary fantasy, and she kept hoping that there might be some clear, however depressing, explanation for the mob, the weird truck, the outbreak of fighting, or, if for nothing else, for the extraordinary power cut that affected everything; all this she hoped because she couldn’t quite allow herself to lapse into a wholesale acceptance of a state of affairs so irrational as to permit the general security of the town to go down the drain together with every other sign of order. Sadly she had to forgo even this slim hope: for while the issue of the blacked-out streetlamps remained unresolved, the destination of the truck with its terrible load, and the nature of that load, were not to remain a mystery for long. She had passed the house of the local celebrity, György Eszter, had left behind the night noises of the park surrounding the old Wooden Theatre and had reached the tiny Evangelical Church when her glance happened to light on a round advertising pillar: she stopped dead in her tracks, stepped closer, then simply stood, and, in case she had made a mistake, read and reread the text which looked like the kind of thing a tramp from some outlying estate might scrawl, though a single perusal should have been enough since the poster, which had obviously been freshly pasted over all the others and still showed traces of fresh paste at the edges, offered an explanation of sorts. She thought that if she could finally isolate one distinct element of the chaos, she would find it easier to orientate herself and so (‘God forbid it should be necessary …!’ of course) defend herself ‘in case of a total collapse’, though the feeble light shed on this by the text only increased her anxiety, the problem all along having been that nothing seemed to provide the faintest shadow of an explanation for the whole cycle of events she had been forced to witness as victim or bystander, till now—as if that ‘feeble light’ (‘The Biggest Whale in the World, and other sensational secrets of nature’) were all too much at once—when she was driven to speculate whether there might not be some firm, yet incomprehensible reason at work in this. Because, well, a circus? Here?! When the end of the world was all too imminent? Fancy allowing such a nightmare menagerie, to say nothing of that evil-smelling beast, into the town! When the place is threatening enough as it is! Who has time for entertainments now, when we’re in a state of anarchy? What an idiotic joke! What a ridiculous, cruel idea! … Or could it be … could it mean precisely that … that it was all over and it didn’t matter any more? That someone was ‘fiddling while Rome burned’?! She hurried away from the pillar and crossed the road. There was a row of two-storey houses on that side, some with a faint light sifting through their windows. She gripped her handbag firmly and leaned into the wind. Reaching the last doorway, she took a

quick last look round, opened the door and locked it behind her. The banisters were icy cold. The palm tree which had been the one jealously guarded splash of colour in the house—and which had been plainly beyond rescue even before her departure—was now most certainly past resuscitation, having frozen to death in the winter. There was a suffocating silence around her. She had arrived. A slip of paper with a message on it had been stuck behind the handle of the door. She took the briefest glance at it, pulled a face then entered, turning the keys in both locks and immediately engaging the safety chain. She leaned against the door and closed her eyes. ‘Thank heaven! I’m home.’ The flat was, as people say, the well-deserved fruit of several years of careful work. When her second husband of blessed memory died suddenly and tragically some five years ago as the result of a stroke and she had had to bury him too, and then, not much later, when her relationship with her son from the first marriage, a boy ‘always in flight, always on the move; with never any improvement in prospect’—resembling in this his father, from whom he clearly inherited the heavy burden of his tendency to depravity—also became untenable and he moved into a sublet, not only did she find she could reconcile herself to the unavoidable, she even felt a little easier in her mind, for however depressed she was by the consciousness of her loss (she had, after all, lost two husbands and—since he no longer existed for her—a son as well), she could clearly see that there was no longer any reason why, at the age of fifty-eight, having always been ‘one or other man’s fool’, she should not at last live entirely for herself. She therefore exchanged—at a notably handsome profit—the family house, which was now too big for her, for a ‘darling’ little flat in the city centre (with intercom in the gateway), and, for the first time in her life, while her acquaintances accorded her unusual respect on account of her loss of two husbands and only tactfully mentioned the son who was generally known to be no good, she, who had up till then owned no more than some bedlinen and the clothes she stood up in, set about the full enjoyment of her own property. She purchased soft imitation-Persian rugs for her floors, tulle curtains and ‘gaily coloured’ blinds for her windows, then, getting rid of the old cumbersome wall unit, installed a new one; heeding the smart advice of the locally highly popular magazine
Interiors,
she refurbished her kitchen on modern lines, had the walls newly painted, chucked out her clumsy old gas convector, and completely refitted the bathroom. She knew no fatigue, she was, as her neighbour, Mrs Virág, acknowledged, bursting with energy; but she only began to feel really in her element once the major work was over and she could start prettifying her ‘little nest’. She was full of ideas: her imagination knew no bounds and she would return from shopping expeditions with, now, a hall mirror in a wrought-iron frame, now, a ‘so-practical’ onion-slicer and now, some eye-catching clothes-brush with, wondrous to behold, an inlaid panorama of the town on the handle. Despite this, some two years after the sad memory of her son’s departure—he had left in tears, she could hardly get him out of the door, and (‘for whole days!’) she was unable to shake off a fog of depression—and despite the fact that, thanks to two years of feverish activity there was hardly a square inch of unoccupied space remaining in the flat, she still felt strangely disorientated by a sense that there was something missing from her life. She bought the last of a set of sweet little china figurines to complete the collection in her cabinet, but realized all too soon that it was not going to fill the void; she racked her brains, reviewed matters, even asked her neighbour for advice, then, one afternoon (when she happened to be working on the latest piece of ‘Irma’ embroidery in the comfy armchair), while her eyes were resting on the china swans and gypsy girls with guitars and had moved along the rank of tearful little boys to the recumbent young girls, so conducive to daydreaming and feelings of happiness, it suddenly occurred to her what ‘important thing’ was missing. Flowers. She did possess two rubber plants and a sickly asparagus that she had brought over from the house, but these fell some way short of providing a satisfactory object for what she referred to as her newly resurrected ‘maternal instincts’. And since, among her acquaintances, there were many who ‘liked pretty things’, she soon acquired a range of beautiful cuttings and buds and bulbs, so much so that within a few years spent in the company of green-fingered friends such as Dr Provaznyik, Mrs Mádai and, of course, Mrs Mahó, not only were her window-sills densely populated by carefully tended miniature palms, philodendra and mother-in-law’s tongue, but she had to order, first one, then three more flower-stands all at once, from a locksmith’s shop in the Romanian quarter, because eventually there was nowhere else to put the numerous fuchsias, aluminium plants and armies of cacti, in what her feelings told her had become a ‘heart-warmingly homely’ little flat. And could it be that all this—the soft rugs, the gaily coloured curtains, the comfortable furniture, the mirror, the onion-slicer, the clothes-brush, the much-praised flowers, and the sense of calm, security, happiness and content they provided—was really all as wood to the fire, finished and done with?! She felt utterly exhausted. The slip of paper in her left hand slid from her fingers and fell to the floor. She opened her eyes, looked at the clock on the wall above the kitchen door, watched the frisky second hand skip from digit to digit, and though it seemed impossible that any further danger should threaten her, however she yearned for peace her feelings of insecurity persisted; her mind was racing furiously, now this or the other experience assumed major significance, and so—having taken off her coat, pulled off her boots, massaged her heavily swollen feet and tucked them into her warm comfy slippers—she first cast a careful eye up and down the deserted main street from her window (but there was ‘not a soul to be seen, no one prowling in the shadows … only the enormous circus wagon … and that unbearable puffing sound …’), then, to check that everything was there, she went through all her cupboards and wardrobes, and finally interrupted a thorough handwashing, thinking that she had better check all the locks just once more in case she had forgotten the most important one. By this time she had calmed down a little, picked up, read and furiously discarded the note into the kitchen litter-bin (four lines, one under the other, saying ‘Hello, Mama, I called,’ three of them crossed through), then went back into the living room, turned up the heating and, to put an end to all her anxiety, examined each of her plants in turn, for, she reasoned, if she found nothing wrong with them, everything else would fall into place. She had no reason to be disappointed in her obliging neighbour, who, as well as giving the place a daily airing, had been urged to keep a careful eye on her jealously tended flowers: the earth in the pots was nicely damp, and her ‘slightly simple and outspoken but essentially good-hearted and conscientious friend’ had even thought to dust down the leaves of some of the most sensitive palms. ‘Dear Rózsi, so utterly priceless!’ sighed Mrs Plauf, in an excess of sentiment, and now that she could see in her mind’s eye—however briefly—that ample figure forever bustling about, and could settle back into one of her apple-green armchairs to survey once more her undamaged possessions, everything appeared in perfect ‘ship-shape order’: the floor, the ceiling, the walls with their floral patterns, all surrounding her with such an air of unshakeable security that her previous sufferings seemed merely a bad dream, the ugly product of strained nerves and a sick imagination. Yes, it might all have been a dream, since she, who for years had lived out a routine of spring-cleaning in the spring and jam- and preserve-making in the autumn, of crochet work in the afternoons, and a daily round comprising the usual cares and joys of passionate indoor gardening, had got used to observing the crazy whirlpool, the mad comings and goings of the outside world, from the decent distance and kindly shelter of her inner one, knowing that whatever fell outside its scope was cloudy, formless and uncertain, and now—when she could sit in peace behind the never-yet-disturbed security of her closed doors it was as if she had turned a lock on the whole world—the unfortunate experience of her journey began to seem less real, and a translucent veil seemed to descend between it and her, so she could only just make out the raucous passengers on the branch-line, the petrifying look of the man in the broadcloth coat, the fat woman tipping over to one side, the darkness in which some poor unfortunate was being silently beaten by the crowd of shadows about him; only indistinctly discern the peculiar circus, the thick cross drawn through the yellowed paper of the timetable; and, even more faintly, herself, like a lost soul, trying desperately now this way now that to make her way home. The outlines of her immediate surroundings grew progressively more distinct as her sufferings of the past few hours lost their reality, though the terrible images of the urine-smelling privy, the filthy gravel between the rails and the circus employee waving to her from his cabin still swirled rapidly and unbearably around her mind. Here, surrounded by her flowers and furniture, in the deepening consciousness of her invulnerability, she no longer feared an assault and felt the tension due to her constant vigilance slowly dissolve, though this did not alleviate her permanent state of anxiety, which had settled like gruel in the stomach and permeated her whole being. Besides, she felt more exhausted than she had ever felt before, and therefore decided to go immediately to bed. It took her only a few minutes to shower and wash out her underwear, then, drawing a warm dressing gown over her thick nightdress, she looked into the pantry, so that while ‘she couldn’t really settle down to a proper supper’ she might at least pick at a bit of preserve before sleep. Considering the times, the pantry, which served as the hub of the whole flat, contained a surprisingly rich store of food: joints of ham with strings of paprika hung like necklaces about them, spicy sausages and smoked bacon suspended from high hooks and, in their shadow on the floor, a low barricade comprised of bags of sugar, flour, salt and rice; neatly ranged on either side of the cupboard were further bags, of coffee beans, poppy seeds and walnuts, not to mention spices, potatoes and onions, a complete bastion of provisions whose copiousness bore ample witness—much as the beautiful forest of dazzling plants outside did—to its creator’s foresight, the whole crowned by ranks of benevolent-looking jars of preserves arranged with military precision along the shelves lining the middle wall. Here was everything she had had time to bottle since the beginning of summer, from fruit in syrup and various savouries, through tomato juice to walnuts preserved in honey, and she ran her eye over the glittering glassware in her usual way, not quite knowing which to choose, finally returning to her room with a jar of boiled cherries in rum; then, before settling back into the apple-green armchair, more out of habit than genuine curiosity, she turned on the television. She leaned back and stretched out, resting her tired feet on a little pouffe, and, refreshed as she was by her shower, in the by-now-pleasant warmth, she was delighted to see that it was operetta time on TV again: perhaps there was hope after all, perhaps the old sense of peace and calm was returning. For she knew very well that while the world remained as infinitely beyond her reach—in her star-struck son’s idiotic phrase, the one he loved to repeat
ad nauseam
—‘as light exceeds vision’, and realized perfectly clearly, that while those, including herself, who snuggled down in quiet little nests, in tiny oases of decency and consideration, continued to go in fear and trembling of events outside, the furious hordes of the anarchic unshaven would instinctively assume command: it was simply that she never rebelled against the ways of the world but accepted its incomprehensible laws, was grateful for its little joys, and therefore felt justified in believing that she could proceed on the assumption, she consoled herself, that fate would spare her and her mode of life. It would spare her and protect the miniature island of her existence; it would not tolerate the possibility that she—and here Mrs Plauf searched for the right words—she who had never desired anything but peace for herself and her fellow human beings, should fall prey to them. The charming delicate strains of the light operetta
(Countess Maritsa
…! she recognized with an immediate thrill of pleasure) swept through the room like a gentle spring breeze, and once she was away, rocking on ‘sweet waves of song’, the startling images of the emergency train with its freight of vulgar folk which had risen anew to terrify her no longer did so, for what she felt for them now was not so much fear as contempt—in fact, precisely what she had felt at the outset of her journey, when she had first glimpsed them in that filthy compartment. The two distinct elements of that unsavoury crowd (‘crude gregarious types scoffing salami’ / ‘silent murderers’) had become so confused in her mind that she felt free at last to look down at them from her eminence, to rise, as it were, above her sorry circumstances, just as the music that flooded from her set rose and covered the earth and all its terrors. It might well be, she speculated thus emboldened, splitting another sweet cherry between her teeth in front of the television, that for now the scum gathered out there in the darkness of night had the run of the place, but, in due course and proper manner, once the racket they made had finally become quite unbearable, they would scurry back where they came from, because, thought Mrs Plauf, that is where they belong, beyond the pale of our fair and ordered world, excluded from it for ever without remission. Until that day arrived, and proper justice was meted out, she went on ever more certain of her own opinions in the matter, let all hell break loose, she would ignore it: she had
absolutely nothing
to do with this mess, this inhuman tyranny, these people who were nothing but jailbait and, while things were as they were, the streets being occupied by such, she would not so much as put her foot outside the house, would refuse to have herself involved in any manner, would not hear another word about it until this disgraceful state of affairs came to an end, until the skies brightened and mutual understanding and sober restraint were once again the order of the day. Lulled and fortified by these thoughts, she watched the triumph of Count Tasilo and the Countess Maritsa as, after many trials and tribulations, they found each other at last, and was about to melt weepy-eyed in the overwhelming happiness of the introduction to the finale when, unexpectedly, she heard the buzzing of the intercom in the gateway. She clutched at her heart, shaking with terror (‘He has found me! He has followed me!’) then, assuming a mask of outrage (‘Really! How dare he!’), she glanced up at the clock on the wall and hastened to the gate. It couldn’t be either a neighbour or a friend, since, originally as a matter of breeding, and nowadays for lack of courage in tackling the town after seven o’clock at night, people did not call on each other, and so, having dismissed from her mind the likelihood that it might be the nightmarish figure in the broadcloth coat, she had little doubt who it actually would be. Ever since she had moved into this sublet of the Harrers, it had, unfortunately, become the practice of her son to turn up at least every third night, often in a wine-sodden state, either to plague her for hours with his mad obsessive talk about stars and planets, or, more frequently on recent occasions, tearfully, bearing flowers his disillusioned mother was convinced he had stolen ‘to recompense her for all the pain he had caused her by his disobedience’. If she had told him once, she had told him a thousand times, in fact every time she finally managed to get rid of him: he was not to come, he was not to bother her, he should leave her in peace, she didn’t want to see him, he shouldn’t so much as set a foot inside her flat, and yes, she really meant it, really didn’t want to see him, that twenty-seven miserable years spent in his company was quite enough, that not a day, not a minute, went by but she blushed in shame at having such a son. As she confessed to her sympathetic cronies, she had tried everything she could think of, and later announced that just because her son was incapable of becoming a decent human being she did not see why she should suffer for his behaviour. She had suffered with Valuska senior, her first husband, who had been completely ruined by alcohol, and she had suffered more than enough with her son—she stressed this time and again to all her acquaintances. They advised her—and she often followed their advice—that ‘until this mad son of hers gave up his bad habits she should, quite simply, refuse to let him in’, but not only was this hard ‘for a mother’s tender heart to bear’, she also had to admit that it was no real solution. After all, it was useless laying down the law while the will that might have enabled him to adopt a normal lifestyle was clearly weak or absent; it was pointless him calling, pointless for Valuska junior—still playing the vagrant—to look in on the third day and proclaim with a radiant expression on his face that ‘his will was now resolved’, not once but again and again. Resigning herself to the hopeless struggle, to the knowledge that nowadays, in his incurable simplicity, he wouldn’t even understand what his mother wanted of him, she invariably sent him packing and that is what she intended to do right now, though when the answer came over the phone, instead of the usual stuttering plea (‘It’s … it’s only me … mama …’), she heard the confidential murmur of a woman’s voice. ‘Who?’ asked Mrs Plauf again in her surprise, and for a second she held the receiver away from her ear. ‘Only me, Piri love! Mrs Eszter!’ ‘Mrs Eszter?! Here?! At this time?!’—she exclaimed, and started to fidget irresolutely with her gown. This woman was one of those people whom Mrs Plauf—and as far as she knew, everyone in town—‘kept at arm’s length’, indeed it was as if they were practically strangers, for apart from giving her the unavoidable but naturally cool nod in the street when they met, she had hardly exchanged a dozen words with her about the weather in the course of the whole year—in the circumstances, therefore, her visit was more than surprising. It wasn’t just Mrs Eszter’s ‘scandalous past, loose morals and currently confused family situation’ that made her the perennial topic of her friends’ conversation, but also the fact that in her colossal arrogance she refused to acknowledge either that, on the one hand, her rude, bumptious and pushy manner and ‘gaudy clothes, so befitting her tub-of-lard figure’ offended the more respectable families in the neighbourhood, or, on the other, that her impudent attempts to curry favour through displays of hypocrisy—‘enough to put a chameleon to shame’—excited both distaste and opposition. As if this were not enough, ever since a few months ago she had taken advantage of the lack of vigilance occasioned by the recent disorder and atmosphere of anxiety to get herself appointed—through the influence of her lover, the chief of police—as president of the women’s committee, she had become even more stuck up than before, her jowls wobbling with pride and triumphant glee, or, as a neighbour so neatly put it, ‘glowing with a nauseating smirk of what she considers charm’. On the pretext of a courtesy visit she had managed to worm her way into even those households that until recently were barred to her. It was plain enough that Mrs Eszter was about some such mischief right now, so she padded down towards the gate with the firm intention of giving her a severe lecture on her lack of manners (‘The creature clearly lacks even the most minimal awareness of when it is proper to call on people!’), and to express her general tendency to reticence the most direct way, by sending her packing. However, this wasn’t how things turned out.