The Melancholy of Resistance (4 page)

It wasn’t how things turned out, nor could it have been, since Mrs Eszter knew very well whom she was dealing with and thought it natural that she, who—as her friend, the chief of police, daily whispered in her ear—was, ‘in terms of height and body-weight, positively gigantic … not to mention the other things’, should, with her inborn sense of superiority and notorious intolerance of opposition, flatten the resistance of stubborn Mrs Plauf. After sugaring her up with a few crooned ‘my dears’, she adopted a ringing manly tone and proclaimed that while she herself was in absolutely no doubt about the time of night, it was of vital importance that she should speak to her then and there on ‘a private matter that could not be deferred’, and thereupon taking advantage of the brief and predictable paralysis suffered by the shocked Mrs Plauf, she simply bundled her through the gate, stormed up the stairs and, bobbing her head out of habit (‘I wouldn’t want to give it a painful crack’), passed straight through the open door into the hall where, to divert attention from the urgency of her visit, she engaged in little formalities about the ‘excellent situation’ of the flat, the ‘ingenious pattern’ of the hallway carpet and the general ‘enviably refined good taste’—a taste of whose ‘common vulgarity’ she was convinced by the time she had darted a few glances about as she hung up her coat. It would be hard to state with any certainty whether the ‘diverting her attention’ ploy truly represented the precise nature of her intentions, since the fact was that her aim—having regard, that is, to the urgency of her need to spend a quarter of an hour or so with Valuska’s mother before the day was over, so that, if they chanced to meet the following day, she could refer to the visit—might have been achieved in any number of ways; however, despite this, she did not after all choose the solution closest to hand (which was, in fact, immediately to sit down in one of those repulsive armchairs and steer the conversation round to ‘that desire for renovation and rejuvenation so evident in the country at large and, in this context, the now-in-every-way-more-energetic work of the keenly enthusiastic local women’s committee’), for though she had made allowance for it, the cosy comfiness, the stolid air of inactivity, the treacly prettiness of this ‘filthy little viper’s nest’ had such a strong effect on her that, suppressing her repulsion with a great effort born out of tactfulness, she was constrained to examine every item in her hostess’s armoury with the gre-a-test of care. Accompanied by Mrs Plauf, who in her fury and confusion hardly dared to breathe a word, but ran along behind her, red-faced, treading on her heels and readjusting each disturbed item, she ran her eyes carefully over each nook and cranny of the flat, stifling under its load of bric-à-brac, and, with feigned appreciation (since ‘it wasn’t yet time to lay one’s cards on the table’), she deployed her booming alto voice to declare, ‘Yes, undoubtedly, women lend meaning to the lifeless objects around them; it is women, and only women, who can provide what we call that individual charm,’ while struggling desperately with the ever more intense temptation to crush one of those little knick-knacks in her enormous palm, to snap it as one would the neck of a chicken, since, damn it all, these comb racks and lace doilies, that swan’s-neck ashtray, the velveteen ‘Persian’ carpet, the ridiculously wispy tulle curtains and, behind the glass of the showcase, those straggling sentimental novels with their hot, sticky, airless contents, most graphically demonstrated to her where the world had got to with its petty unbridled indulgence in ‘idle pleasures and feeble desires’. She saw and made a mental note of everything, nothing escaped her attention, and taking it all in, having summoned all her self-control, she tortured herself further by taking a bitter delight in breathing in the scent-polluted air of the flat, which reminded her so precisely of ‘the sickeningly dainty pong of doll’s-houses’ and which, even a mile away, eloquently proclaimed the pitiable condition of its inhabitant, it was a stink from which she shrank, especially as, even on the threshold, it induced in her—or so she was wont to remark with withering sarcasm to the chief of police whenever she returned from one of her informal visits following her election—an earnest desire to vomit. Whether it was just her tendency to mockery or a genuine case of nausea, her friend could be quite certain that she was being subjected to no ordinary trials and tribulations, for ever since ‘the spirit of communal will had finally been recovered’ sufficiently to elevate her from the position of leader of the local male-voice choir (a post which occasioned her some humiliation and one whose demands were relieved only by that so-called ‘exclusive repertoire’ of marches, work songs and odes to spring) to president of the women’s committee, a figurehead of iron will, she had had to fritter her days away (‘hours at a time’) in such flats, if only to demonstrate to herself, again and again, that what she had suspected all along was in fact true beyond the shadow of a doubt. For clearly as she saw that it was precisely in such debilitating circumstances—among over-sweetened preserves and fluffy eiderdowns, among rugs with their fringes combed straight and armchairs protected by tightly knotted covers—that every powerful urge came to grief; that it was in this fatal slough—populated by those who considered themselves to be the cream of local society, who in their ridiculous house slippers devoured equally ridiculous operettas and treated simple healthier folk with contempt—that each decent impulse sank to oblivion; she understood the phenomenon all too well, and saw that despite, for example, the months of work following the presidential launch of the epoch-making campaign for renewal, the movement had unfortunately been frustrated. To be honest it was no more than she had expected so she wasn’t really surprised when this fine society of parasites, saturated by their own sense of self-worth, coolly rejected her carefully considered arguments, since behind the eternal excuses (such as, for example, ‘A clean-up in December? Perhaps later when it’s time for proper spring-cleaning …’), Mrs Eszter saw straight to the heart of their opposition, understanding that their impotence and craven servility sprang from an unreasonable, though, to them, justified, fear of all enterprise that aimed at general renewal, a renewal which, to them, might look like general decay, for in all passionate espousals of the new, people were liable to detect traces of an equally passionate drift towards chaos, and—quite rightly—suspect that the powers unleashed, instead of protecting that which was irrecoverably dead and buried, would smash it to pieces in the good cause of replacing the featureless boredom of their selfish lives with ‘the elevating passion of communal action’. One couldn’t deny that in this evaluation of the unusual and anarchic events of the immediate past—her confidant, the captain, and one or two right-minded people excepted—she probably stood alone in the town, but this gave her no cause for concern, nor did she think it necessary to reconsider her position, because something whispered to her that ‘the victory that justified all’ would not be long delayed. As to the question of what this victory would consist of, she could not have answered it in one or two simple sentences, but her faith was so firm that however resistant or numerous ‘these refined coteries of slippered old pantaloons’ might be she would not be cowed, for not only had she really nothing to fear from them, but she knew full well that the true enemy—and this was why this battle for hearts and minds had become such a personal struggle for her—was György Eszter himself, a man generally regarded as an eccentric hermit living in absolute isolation, but in fact merely sickly and lazy, Eszter, her semi-respectable husband-in-name, who, unlike her, ‘had no record whatsoever of involvement in civic affairs’—who had attained an ambiguous celebrity in town by spending years lying in bed so that (‘let us say’) once a week he could take a peek out of his window … Could he be the true enemy? He was more than that: for Mrs Eszter he was both ‘the hopeless and insurmountable walls of hell’, and, at the same time, her only hope of maintaining her well-earned place among the most influential citizens, in other words a snare, the perfect, faultless trap whose effectiveness it was vain to doubt, one she could neither escape nor wreck. Because, now, as always, Eszter continued to be the key to the operation, the decisive link in the chain of the fulfilment of her high ambition, the very man who, years ago, when, owing to what he called his ‘back problems’, gave up the directorship of the local school of music, told her quite simply and with boundless cynicism that he ‘no longer required her household services’, and she had had to dig deep into their savings to rent herself a flat by the marketplace, the very man who, to compound his deed—as an act of revenge, for what else could it be?—abandoned such few commitments as they had shared, and resigned his post as director of the town’s orchestra, because, apparently, as she was to hear from others, he was no longer interested in anything but music and did not wish to take up his time with other things although Mrs Eszter, if anyone, could have told the world what ear-splittingly false notes he jangled out on that del-i-ber-at-ely out-of-tune piano, only, of course, if and when he could bring himself to rouse that body of his, enfeebled as it was by his habit of lounging about, and extricate himself from his monstrous piles of soft cushions and travelling rugs. When she thought back on all those years of endless humiliation, she would happily have given anything to have taken a handy axe and chopped her insufferable husband into tiny pieces there where he lay, but she knew very well that this was the one expedient not even remotely open to her since she had to admit that without Eszter the town would remain closed to her, and that whatever she set her mind on she would continually be running up against him. Explaining their separation by reference to her husband’s need for solitude and quiet working conditions, she was forced to maintain the appearance of marriage, and to suppress even the thought of a fiercely desired divorce; worse still she had to resign herself to the fact that with the assistance of Eszter’s disciple and favourite, the terminally lunatic Valuska, Mrs Plauf’s degenerate son from her first marriage, her husband—at first secretly but later quite openly so the whole town knew about it—had taken to doing all the washing, including the ‘filthy underclothes’. The situation looked undeniably grave but Mrs Eszter was not to be defeated: though she didn’t know whether personal revenge or ‘the struggle for the common good’ was the more appropriate, or whether it was more important to pay back Eszter (‘for everything!’) or to render her own rather unstable ‘position’ impregnable, of one thing she was certain, that this unfortunate state of affairs could not last for ever, and that one day, perhaps even in the not-too-distant future, once she had achieved a fully deserved power and attained high enough rank, she could finally settle the hash of this pathetic scoundrel who was ‘determined’ to make a laughing stock of her and make her life a misery. And she had sound enough reasons for thinking that things might turn out like this, because (for it wasn’t simply a case of, ‘It must be so, therefore it will be so’) the office of president not only presented the opportunity of ‘a free hand and the unfettered exercise of power’, but was also an encouraging sign of her growing independence from him—not to mention the fact that since she had discovered how to gain the support of the obstinate bourgeoisie for the drastic measures envisaged by the committee and, at the same time, re-established her useful connection with Eszter, her self-confidence, which had been sadly lacking, was now boundless and she was fully convinced that she was on the right road and that no one could stop her marching directly towards her goal … The plan was foolproof after all, and, naturally, like all ‘strokes of genius’, simple as pie, it was just that, as is usually the case, it was hard work achieving that unique and peculiarly appropriate resolution; of course she had clearly seen, right from the beginning when the movement was first advertised, that indifference and opposition to it could be overcome only by bringing Eszter ‘into play’; if only he could be forced into taking part, persuaded into the figurehead role, the programme represented by the empty slogan of A TIDY YARD, AN ORDERLY HOUSE, which had been up till then a contemptible failure, might form the basis of a wide-ranging, genuine and powerful initiative. Yes, but how? That was the question. It took her weeks, nay months before, having discarded a whole range of impractical methods from simple persuasion to force of arms, she stumbled on the one sure way of putting him on the spot, but ever since then, once she had realized that her scheme depended on no more than ‘that soft creature, Valuska’ and his mother, Mrs Plauf, who was commonly known to be estranged from and therefore all the more passionately adored by him, such an utter sense of calm had descended on her that nothing or no one could shake her out of it; furthermore, now that she was sitting among the spongy carpets and overpolished furniture of this tiny (‘… yet so very buxom’) woman, she was vaguely amused to see how, every time she dropped and scattered ash from her cigarette, or when she approvingly tasted the cherry preserve remaining on the table, Mrs Plauf’s cheeks ‘absolutely blazed’. She was delighted to observe that the helpless fury of her hostess (‘She’s frightened of me!’ she decided with some satisfaction) was slowly overcoming her earlier indignation, and so, glancing round the room stuffed with plants which made her feel she was in some meadow or yard full of loose clods of grass, she switched back to her low murmur—for no other reason now than to amuse herself—to remark by way of acknowledgement: ‘Well, that’s how it is. It’s every townee’s desire to bring nature indoors. We all feel like that, Piri, love.’ But Mrs Plauf did not answer, she did the least she was constrained to do and simply gave a little nod of her head, which was a signal clear enough for Mrs Eszter
to comprehend that she should get on to her business. Of course, whether Mrs Plauf did or did not agree to play her part in the matter—since she couldn’t have guessed that she had already said ‘yes’ by failing to prevent the invasion of her flat, the sheer presence of her visitor being the whole point—her willingness or otherwise was of little importance; nevertheless, having painstakingly described the situation for her (in the manner of ‘don’t for a moment think, my dear, it is I who want him, no, it’s the town that wants Eszter, but to persuade a man as busy as everyone knows he is to act is so hard only your nice gentle son can do it …’), and having addressed her in the friendliest manner possible while looking directly into her eyes, she was undeniably and unpleasantly surprised by the immediate rejection, because she could see perfectly well it wasn’t that relations between Valuska and Mrs Plauf ‘had totally broken down some years ago’, and that it was Mrs Plauf’s ‘parental duty to distance herself from anything to do with Valuska, though one could well imagine what pain and bitterness one suffered having to say this of one’s own son who did not lack a heart but was distinctly ungrateful and useless’, but that all her suppressed fury at her feeble helplessness had been concentrated into this ‘no’ which would serve to pay Mrs Eszter back for the indignity of the last few minutes, for the fact she was small and weak while Mrs Eszter was large and powerful, that, however she would have liked to deny it, she had been forced to admit that it was her son who was ‘a lodger at Hagelmayer’s’, her son who was a village idiot whose abilities barely qualified him to be newsboy for the local post office—and that she had to own up to all this before a stranger disapproved of by all her friends. There was enough evidence for her to have grasped this anyway, and seeing that Mrs Plauf, ‘this midget’, was quite impotent before her, as if only by way of recompense for the fact she had been forced to sit for almost twenty minutes and endure ‘that infuriating smile’ and those mock-pious looks of hers, she leapt from the deep apple-green armchair with a contemptuous aside to the effect that she must be going, cut her way through the thick foliage, accidentally brushing a tiny sampler from the wall with her shoulder, and, without another word, stubbed her cigarette out in a never-before-used ashtray and snatched down her enormous black fake-fur coat. For while she was perfectly capable of coolly appraising a situation, knowing she could no longer be surprised by anything, once anyone dared say no to her, as Mrs Plauf did just now, her gorge immediately rose and she practically burst with gall, for she had no clear idea what to do in the circumstances. The fury simmered in her, the anger consumed her, so much so that when the neurotically hand-wringing Mrs Plauf addressed a question to her just as she was snapping the last steel clip of her coat into place (her eyes flashing, her lips tight, neck craned back, staring at the ceiling), something to the effect that she was ‘terribly anxious’ (‘… This evening … when I got back from my sisters’ house … and … I hardly recognized the town … Has anybody explained why the streetlamps are no longer lit? … This sort of thing never used to happen before’), she practically screamed at the terrified housewife: ‘You have every cause for anxiety. We are on the threshold of a more searching, more honest, more open society. There are new times just around the corner, my dear Piri.’ At these significant words, and more particularly because Mrs Eszter emphasized the last sentence by jabbing an admonitory finger in the air, the colour quite drained from Mrs Plauf’s face; but none of this rendered her any kind of satisfaction, because, however pleasant it was to see this and to know that the little ‘bag of tits’ would persist in hoping for one word, for one reassuring answer from her unintentionally provoked visitor all the way down the stairs, right until she had closed the gate behind her, and however clearly she realized that she should have accepted this as recompense, the wound to her self-esteem administered by Mrs Plauf, this ‘no’, like a poisoned arrow stuck in a tree, continued to quiver for an unaccountable length of time and she was forced shamefully to admit that what should have been merely an unpleasant sting (for she had after all convincingly accomplished her goal and this tiny setback was of little importance) was slowly intensifying to an ever more acute pain. If Mrs Plauf had agreed enthusiastically, as one had every right to expect she would, she would have remained an easily manipulated tool, unaware of the clash of events above her, events which, in any case, were of no account to her, and her insignificant role in them would, quite properly, have come to an end, but no (‘But no!’), with this rejection her superfluous being was now elevated to the role of what amounted to anonymous partner; this dwarfish nonentity (dwarfish, that is to say, compared with Mrs Eszter’s unquestionably intenser reality) had, so to speak, dragged her down to her own safely ignorable level, so that she might revenge herself on her visitor’s radiant air of superiority, which she could neither tolerate nor resist. And while of course this helpless sense of injury could not last for ever, it wouldn’t have been proper to claim, after all this, that she was quite simply over ‘the business’, nor did she claim it when later—at home by that time—she recounted the meeting to her friend, though she did perhaps skate over certain details, and remarked only on how ‘the wonderful, breathtakingly fresh air’, which revived her immediately she set foot outside Mrs Plauf’s stifling stairwell, had had ‘the most beneficial effect’ on her judgement, so that by the time she had reached Nadabán’s butcher’s shop, she had recovered her earlier equanimity, was once again decisive, invulnerable, absolutely calm and full of confidence. And this—the decisive effect of sixteen degrees of frost on her frayed nerves—was certainly no exaggeration, for Mrs Eszter genuinely belonged to that class of people who ‘sicken with spring and collapse in summer’, for whom enervating warmth, incapacitating heat and the sun blazing in the sky were a source of terror, confining her to bed with the most shocking migraine and a strong tendency to bleed; one of that class, in other words, for whom cold, not the glowing fireplace, is the natural medium that offers protection from unremitting Evil, those who seem practically resurrected once terminal frost sets in and polar winds sweep round corners, for it is only winter that can clear their vision, cool their ungovernable passions and reorganize that mass of loose thought dissolved in summer sweats; and so it was along Baron Béla Wenckheim Avenue, leaning into the icy wind that frightens weaker ordinary people with its hard early frosts, that she felt cured and properly prepared to assess her new burden so that she could rise above Mrs Plauf’s hurtful attitude. Because there was much to rise above and aspire to and much to look at: so, while the cold penetrated and refreshed every atom of her body, she propelled the vast weight of her importance along the unremittingly straight pavement with ever greater abandon, as if she were as light as a sparrow, and decided to her satisfaction that the irreversible process of ruin, schism and disintegration would continue according to its own infrangible rules, and that, day by day, the range of ‘whatever things’ were still capable of functioning or showing vigour was growing narrower; the way she saw it the very houses were dying by imperceptible degrees of neglect, obedient to the fate that was certain to overtake them: the bond between lodger and lodging was broken; stucco was dropping in great chunks, rotten window-frames had separated from walls and, on either side of the street, roof after roof showed signs of sagging, as if deliberately to demonstrate that something in the constitution of beams and rafters—and not just beams and rafters but stones, bones and earth itself—was in the process of losing cohesion; along the pavements the rubbish that no one felt like collecting and no one did collect was spreading ever more luxuriantly across the whole town, and the cats that haunted loose mounds of it, cats whose numbers seemed to have increased at an impossible rate and who more or less took over the streets at night, had grown so confident that when Mrs Eszter wanted to cut through a thick forest of them they hardly deigned to move out of even her way, and when they did it was slowly, insolently, at the last possible moment. She saw all this as she saw the rusty shutters on shops not opened for weeks, the drooping arms of unlit ornamental lampposts, the cars and buses abandoned on the street for lack of fuel … and suddenly a delightful tickling sensation ran all down her spine because this slow decay had, for her, long ceased to signify some terminal disillusion but was instead a harbinger of what would soon replace a world as ripe for ruin as this; not an end then but a beginning, something that would be founded ‘not on sickly lies but on the harsh merciless truth’, something that would place supreme emphasis on ‘fitness of body and a powerful and beautiful desire for the intoxicating realm of action’. Mistress of the future, she already had courage enough to look the town full in the eye, perfectly convinced that she was standing on the threshold of ‘sweeping changes leading to something new, something of infinite promise’, and it wasn’t only the usual every-day signs of collapse that confirmed her view, but a good many ordinary yet strange and, in their own way, not altogether unwelcome occurrences which hastened to prove that the unavoidable resurrection, despite the lack of ‘normal human resolve to enter the fray’, had been ordained by the mysterious and overwhelming forces of heaven itself. The day before yesterday the enormous water-tower at the back of the Göndölcs Gardens had begun—and continued for some minutes—to sway dangerously above the tiny houses surrounding it, a phenomenon which, in the opinion of the physics and math master of the local grammar school, a trustworthy member of the astronomical observation group whose telescope was positioned on top of the tower and who had interrupted many hours of solitary chess to run down breathless with excitement to proclaim the news, was ‘quite inexplicable’. Yesterday, the clock of the Catholic church in the main square, immobile for decades, startled everyone by beginning to strike (a sound which shot like electricity through Mrs Eszter!), a fact all the more extraordinary when you considered that of the four rusted parts of the mechanism, three, from which even the hands had been removed, leapt into simultaneous action, and continued, with ever shorter intervals between their dull ticking, to beat out passing time. It was no wonder then that, having ever since nightfall expected to come upon some other ‘ominous sign’, she was not surprised at what she saw when, arriving by the Hotel Komló at the corner of Hétvezér Square, she glanced up at the gigantic poplar which used to stand there. This colossus, over sixty feet high, a constant reminder of the great floods of the nearby River Körös, a wonderful shelter for hordes of sparrows and a monument which for generations had been the marvel of the town, was lying, lifeless, against the hotel’s Hétvezér Square façade, straddled across the entire extent of the square, prevented from collapsing into the alley between only by thick branches entangled in the half-collapsed guttering; it wasn’t that the trunk had been snapped in two by some violent gust, nor that it had been eaten away by worms and years of acid rain: the whole thing, roots and all, had split the hard concrete of the road. It was only to be expected that one day this ancient of days should eventually collapse, but that it should happen