The Melancholy of Resistance (5 page)

now,
that the roots should release their hold
at this precise moment,
held a peculiar significance for Mrs Eszter. She stared at the ghastly apparition, at the tree lying diagonally across the dark square, then, with the knowing smile of one initiated into such things, remarked: ‘Of course. How could it be otherwise?’ and with this secret smile playing about her lips continued on her way in the secret knowledge that the sequence of ‘miracles’ and ‘omens’ was far from over. And she was not wrong. A mere few steps later, her eye, hungry now for more strange phenomena, lit on a small group of people silently loitering down Liget Street, whose presence here at this hour—for it was an act of courage to venture out of doors after dark in a town currently bereft of streetlighting—was wholly inexplicable. As to who they might be and what they wanted here at this time, she couldn’t begin to imagine, and truth to tell she wasn’t particularly bothered to try, for she immediately read this, along with the water-tower, the church clock and the state of the poplar tree, as simply another harbinger of the resurrection from ruins that was sure to follow; however, when, at the end of the boulevard, she entered the arena of Kossuth Square’s bare acacias and discovered group upon group of silently waiting people, a hot flush ran straight through her, since it suddenly occurred to her that it was not wholly impossible that after many long months (‘Years! Years! …’), after all her enduring and certain faith (‘Perhaps! …), the decisive moment when preparation would give way to action might actually have come and ‘the prophecy be fulfilled’. As far as she could see from this side of the square, roughly fifty to sixty men in twos or threes stood on the icy flat-trodden grass of the market-place: their feet shod in waterproof boots or heavy brogues, wearing caps with ear-flaps or greasy peasant hats on their heads and, here and there, hands clutching cigarettes that glowed into sudden life. Even under these conditions, in the darkness, it wasn’t hard to see that they were all outsiders, and the fact that fifty or sixty strangers should stand about in numbing cold at such a late hour of the evening was in itself more than surprising. Their dumb immobility seemed all the more peculiar and more spellbinding to Mrs Eszter, for it was like glimpsing the angels of the apocalypse in mufti at the end of the street. Though she should have crossed the square diagonally, cutting through by the most direct route to her flat in Honvéd Passage, just off the square, she felt a twinge—only a twinge, mind—of fear, and skirted their irregular ranks by pursuing an L shape round them, holding her breath and flitting like a shadow, till she reached the far side. Having arrived at the corner of Honvéd Passage and glancing back one last time, she was, if not exactly flabbergasted, certainly deeply disappointed to discover the enormous form of the circus vehicle, a circus whose arrival had been well advertised (though without a fixed date), for it was clear to her in a moment that the crowd behind her were not so much ‘the disguised heralds of the new age’ as, in all likelihood, ‘ragged ticket touts for the circus’, who, in their boundless avarice, were capable of suffering the whole night in the cold so that they could make a bit of money by buying up all the tickets in the morning once the booking office was open. Her disappointment was all the more bitter because, quite apart from the rude awakening it provided from her feverish reverie, it diminished the proud pleasure she had personally taken in the hiring and arrival of the by-now notorious company: the result of her first significant public victory a week ago when—with the decisive support of the police chief—she managed to crush the resistance of the more cowardly members of the town’s executive committee who, by referring to the fact that all reports from outlying villages and hamlets, not to mention unsubstantiated gossip, suggested that the weird troupe caused alarm and unrest wherever it appeared, and that, furthermore, there had been one or two ugly incidents, had wished to ban it altogether from the town’s precincts. Yes: it had been her first significant triumph (there were many who said that her speech about ‘the inalienable rights of common curiosity’ could easily have been printed in the papers), yet, despite this, she could not enjoy the fruits of victory, since it was precisely because of the circus that she discovered, too late, the laughably false nature of her misapprehension concerning the true identity of these loiterers about her. Since she felt the mordancy of ridicule more keenly than she did the attraction and mystery of the enormous wagon, she didn’t even bother to investigate it in order to satisfy her own ‘inalienable rights of common curiosity’ about a vehicle so exotic it fully lived up to its publicity, but with a withering glance of contempt turned her back on both ‘the stinking juggernaut and those impudent rogues’, and strode with clanging steps down the narrow pavement home. This fit of temper, needless to say—just like the one which followed her encounter with Mrs Plauf—consisted, as the idiom has it, more of smoke than of fire, and by the time she had reached the end of Honvéd Passage and slammed the frail gate of the garden behind her, she had succeeded in getting over her disappointment, for she had only to remind herself that by the end of the next day she would no longer be subject to her fate but the genuine master of it, and immediately she could breathe more easily and begin to feel the full import of her self once again, a self that chose decisively to dismiss any thought of premature daydreaming, since ‘it desired victory and was resolute in the pursuit of it’. The landlady, an old wine merchant, occupied the front block; she inhabited the rear building of the ramshackle peasant dwelling, and while the place could have done with some repair she was not dissatisfied with it; for though the low ceiling prevented her standing up as straight as she might have wished and undoubtedly made movement difficult, and while the tiny ill-fitting windows and the walls crumbling with damp left scope for improvement, Mrs Eszter was so far a disciple of the so-called simple life that she hardly noticed these insignificant details, since, according to her convictions, if there was a bed, a wardrobe, a lamp and a basin, and if the roof didn’t leak in ‘the living unit’, all possible human needs were satisfied. And so, apart from a vast sprung iron bedstead, a single wardrobe, a stool with basin and jug, and a crested chandelier (she tolerated neither carpet, nor mirror, nor curtains), there was only an unvarnished table and a chair that had lost its back to serve for meals, a fold-away music-stand for the increasing amounts of official paper-work she had to bring home, and a coat-stand for guests (should there be any) to hang their coats on. As concerned the latter of course, ever since she had met the chief of police, she received no one except him, and he came every evening, for, from the day when the leather belt and shoulder strap, the polished boots and the revolver hanging at his side had swept her off her feet, she regarded him not only as a close friend, a man fit to support a solitary woman, but as an intimate confederate to whom she could trust her deepest most dangerous secrets, and pour out her heart in moments of weakness. At the same time—apart from all the basic conditions—it was not a trouble-free relationship, for the police chief, who was in any case prone to morose silences punctuated by the odd sudden fit of temper, was preoccupied by his ‘tragic family circumstances’—a wife who died in the flower of her youth and two little boys left to cope without a mother’s affections—and was a slave to drink, and, on being repeatedly questioned about it, would often admit that the only true remedy for his bitterness lay in the feminine warmth exuded by Mrs Eszter, which, to this day, was a burden she could never escape from. To this very day indeed, for Mrs Eszter—who had expected him to have arrived well before her—feared that the chief was at this very moment sitting in one of those suburban bars in his customary state of tortured gloom, so when she heard footsteps outside she went straight to the kitchen table, immediately reaching for the vinegar and box of bicarbonate, knowing from previous experience that the only cure for his condition was that (unfortunately) highly popular local mixture known as ‘goose-spritzer’, which, in the face of general opinion, she believed to be the only efficacious—if emetic—treatment, not only for indigestion the day after, but for drunkenness on the day. To her surprise the visitor turned out to be not the chief but Harrer, Valuska’s landlord, a stonemason who, probably because of his pockmarked face, was known to locals as ‘the vulture’; there he lay, flat out on the ground, because, as one could see at a glance, his legs, which were incapable of indefinitely supporting his constantly collapsing body, had given way just before his helplessly dangling hands could grasp the handle of the door. ‘What are you doing lying there?’ she barked at him, but Harrer didn’t move. He was a small, puny homunculus of a man; lying crumpled on the ground, his feeble legs folded under him, he would have fitted perfectly into one of those large dough-baskets stored out in the garden—furthermore he stank so intensely of cheap brandy that within a few minutes the fearful smell had filled the entire yard and penetrated every nook and cranny of the house, rousing even the old woman from her bed, who, as she drew the curtain of her courtyard window aside, could only wonder why ‘decent people can’t be content with drinking wine’. But by that time, Harrer, who seemed to have changed his mind, recovered consciousness and leapt from the doorway with such agility that Mrs Eszter almost thought the whole thing a joke. Nevertheless, it was immediately clear that it wasn’t, for waving his brandy bottle with one hand, the mason suddenly produced a tiny bouquet of flowers with the other, and, swaying in the most dangerous fashion, squinted at her in a manner so intensely beyond fooling, so utterly unreciprocated by Mrs Eszter—especially once she could make sense of his gulping and gasping to the effect that all he wanted was for Mrs Eszter to hug him as she once used to (for ‘you, your ladyship, and only you, can provide consolation for this poor sad heart of mine …!’)—that, grabbing him by the shoulder-pads of his coat, she raised him into the air and, sans quips or jokes, heaved him in the direction of the garden gate. The heavy coat landed like a half-empty sack some few yards off (for the sake of accuracy, right in front of the window of the old woman, who was still staring and wagging her head), and Harrer, while not quite certain whether this new fall was in any significant sense different from his earlier one, began to suspect he was not wanted and made to scamper away; leaving Mrs Eszter to return to her room, turn the key in the lock and try to put the affront out of her mind by switching on the pocket radio next to her bed. The pleasantly rousing tunes—‘jolly traditional airs’ as it happens—had, as always, a good effect on her, and little by little succeeded in calming her seething temper, which was just as well, for while she should have been used to such irruptions, it not having been the first time that feckless characters had disturbed her at night, she flew into a fury every time one of her old acquaintances, such as Harrer (to whom she had no real objection for she could happily while away the time with him—‘Now and then, of course, just now and then’), ‘showed a total disregard of her new social position’ in which she could no longer allow herself to relax, for whoever Mrs Eszter perceived as the enemy would be waiting ‘for precisely such an opportunity’. Yes, she needed her peace and quiet, for she knew that tomorrow the fate of an entire movement would be decided; rest was what she needed without a shadow of doubt; and that is why, on hearing the unmistakable sound of the police chief’s footsteps out in the yard, her first wish was that he would simply turn round with all his accoutrements of belt, strap, boots and gun and go home. But when she opened the door and saw the short and scrawny figure who hardly came up to her shoulders and was probably drunk again, a quite different desire suddenly took hold of her, for not only was he quite steady on his feet, he didn’t look as though he was about to start bawling at her either. He stood rather like ‘a panther about to spring’, with a pugnacious look which, she immediately understood, called less for bicarbonate of soda than abandoned passion; for her friend, companion and comrade—far surpassing her hopes of the evening—came to her as a hungry warrior, whom, she felt, it was impossible to resist. She couldn’t deny, for she never did lack masculine resolution, that ‘she was capable of properly appreciating the rubber-booted man who urged her on to rarely achieved heights of orgasm’, nor could she sneeze at the opportunity when someone of otherwise modest ability—like him—so clearly promised her personal advancement. So she said nothing, asked for no explanations, did not dismiss him, but, without any more ado, responded to his ever more passionate expression (which each second promised greater and greater delight), by languorously stepping out of her dress, dropping her underclothes in a heap on the floor, then slipping into the specially reserved flame-coloured baby-doll nightie he was so fond of and, as if obedient to command, arranging herself with a shy smile on all fours on the bed. By that time ‘her friend, companion and comrade’ had likewise divested himself of his gear, switched off the light and, wearing his heavy boots, with his customary shout of ‘To arms!’ threw himself on her. And Mrs Eszter was not disappointed: within a few minutes she had managed to rid the chief of all his troublesome memories of the evening, and after they had collapsed on the bed, breathless from their wild coupling, and he, gradually sobering, had received her acknowledgement of satisfaction delivered in an appropriately military manner, she rendered him a slightly edited version of her encounters with Mrs Plauf and the rabble in the market square, after which she felt so wonderfully confident and calm, her whole body suffused by such an extraordinarily sweet sense of peace, that she was certain that not only would the next day crown her with glory, but that there was no one who could possibly deprive her of the final fruits of victory. She wiped herself with a towel, had a glass of water,
then lay back on the bed and only half-listened to the chief’s rambling account of his doings, because there was nothing more important now than this ‘confidence and calm’ and that ‘sweet sense of peace’, these messages of happiness that now rose from every nook and cranny of her body and rippled merrily through her. What did it matter that the ‘fat circus manager’ kept nagging him so long for ‘the customary local licence’, what did she care that the chief recognized ‘a gentleman from top to toe’ in the elegant though slightly fishy-smelling figure of the director of the world-famous company, and holding ‘an unopened bottle of Szeguin’ in his hand, extended his attention, as befitting a guardian of law and order, to suggest the assurance of some modest police presence (and that the request for such be tendered in writing) so that the three-day visiting performance be conducted without any let or hindrance, when she was just beginning truly to feel that everything was bound to lose significance once ‘the body began to speak’, and that there was nothing more delightful and elevating than the moment when thigh, tail, breast and groin desire nothing but to drift gently and smoothly into sleep? So satisfied did she feel that she confessed to him that she no longer needed him, and so, after he had several times ventured beyond the warmth of her eiderdown and shrank back in again, she sent the chief on his way with a few words of sound maternal advice regarding ‘the orphans’, watching him pass through the door into the freezing cold and thinking of him, if not precisely with love—for she had always dissociated herself from such romantic literary nonsense—then at least with a certain pride, then, having exchanged her seductive baby-doll for the warmer flannel nightgown, she slipped back into bed at last to enjoy ‘her well-earned sleep’. Using her elbow, she smoothed out the sheet where it had rucked up under her, dragged the eiderdown back over her with her feet, then, turning first on her left side then her right, found the most comfortable position to lie in, pressed her face into the soft warmth of her arm and closed her eyes. She was a sound sleeper, so after a few minutes she quietly nodded off, and the occasional jerking of her feet, the rolling of her eyeballs under their thin lids and the ever more regular rising and falling of the eiderdown were accurate indicators that she was no longer properly aware of the world about her, that she was drifting further and further from the present enjoyment of naked power which was rapidly diminishing but would be hers again tomorrow, and which in her hours of consciousness whispered that she was mistress of her poor cold possessions and that their fate depended on her. The washbasin no longer existed, neither did the untouched glass of bicarbonate; the wardrobe, the clothes-rack and the stained towel thrown into a corner, all disappeared; floor, walls and ceiling had no more meaning for her; she herself was nothing but an object among objects, one of millions of defenceless sleepers, a body, like others, returning each night to those melancholy gates of being which may be entered but once and then with no prospect of return. She scratched her neck—but she was no longer aware of doing so; for a moment her face contorted into a grimace—but it was no longer aimed at anyone in particular; like a child crying itself to sleep she gave a brief sob—but it no longer carried meaning because it was only her breath seeking a regular pattern; her muscles relaxed, and her jaws—like those of the dying—slowly fell open, and by the time the chief had negotiated the severe frost, got home and thrown himself fully clothed beside the sleeping forms of his two sons, she had already penetrated to the dense core of her dream … In the thick darkness of her room it seemed nothing stirred: the dirty water in the enamel basin was preternaturally still, on the three hooks of the clothes-rack, like great sides of beef above a butcher’s counter, hung her sweater, her raincoat and a substantial quilted jacket, the bunch of keys hanging from the lock had stopped swinging, having finally absorbed her earlier momentum. And, as if they had been waiting for just this moment, as if this utter immobility and complete calm had been some sort of signal, in the great silence (or perhaps out of it), three young rats ventured out from under Mrs Eszter’s bed. Carefully the first slithered past, shortly followed by the other two, their little heads raised and attent, ready to freeze before leaping; then, silently, still bound by their instinctive timidity, they proceeded, hesitating and freezing every few steps, to a tour of the room. Like intrepid scouts for an invading army apprising themselves of enemy positions before an onslaught, noting what lay where, what looked safe or dangerous, they examined the skirting boards, the crumbling nooks and corners and the wide cracks in the floorboards, as if mapping out the precise distances between the bolthole under the bed, the door, the table, the cupboard, the slightly teetering stool and the window-ledge—then, without touching anything, in the blinking of an eye, they shot off under the bed in the corner again, to the hole that led through the wall to freedom. It was no more than a minute before the cause of their unexpected retreat became apparent, for their intuition had warned them something was about to happen and this faultless, naked and instinctive fear of the unpredictable was enough to drive them to the option of immediate flight. By the time Mrs Eszter moved and disturbed the up-till-then-unbroken silence, the three rats were cowering in perfect safety at the foot of the outside wall at the back of the house; so she rose from the very ocean bed of sleep, drifting for a few minutes up into the shallows through which consciousness might faintly glimmer, and kicked off the eiderdown, stretching her limbs as if about to wake. There was of course no prospect of that yet and, after a few heavy sighs, she settled and began her descent into the depths from which she had only just risen. Her body—perhaps simply because it was no longer covered—seemed to grow even bigger than it already was, too big for the bed and indeed for the entire room: she was an enormous dinosaur in a tiny museum, so large no one knew how she had got there since both doors and windows were far too small to admit her. She lay on the bed, legs spread wide, and her round belly—very much an elderly man’s beer-gut—rose and fell like a sluggish pump; her nightgown gathered itself about her waist, and since it was no longer capable of keeping her warm, her thick thighs and stomach broke out in goosepimples. For now only the skin registered the change; the sleeper remained undisturbed, and since the noise had died away and there was nothing else to alarm them, the three rats once more ventured into the room, a little more at home this time but still maintaining utmost vigilance, prepared to flee at the slightest provocation, retracing their previous routes across the floor. They were so fast, so silent, their existence barely crossed the sensible threshold of reality; never once contradicting their blurry shadowy essence, they continually balanced the extent of their excursions against the peril of their sphere of activity, so that no one should discover them: those slightly darker patches in the darkness of the room were not hallucinations born of fatigue, not merely shadows cast by the immaterial birds of night, but three obsessively careful animals, tireless in their search for food. For that is why they had come as soon as the sleeper had fallen quiet, and why they returned, and if they hadn’t yet run up the table leg to pinch the heel of bread lying among the crumbs it was only because they had to be certain nothing unexpected would happen. They started with the crust, but little by little, and with ever greater abandon, they stuck their sharp little noses into the loaf itself and nibbled at it, though there was no sign of impatience in the rapid movement of their jaws, and the bread, tugged this way and that in three directions, was almost consumed by the time it rolled off the table and under the stool. Of course they froze when it hit the ground and once more stuck their snouts into the air, prepared to make a dash for it, but all was quiet on the Eszter front, there was nothing but slow even breathing, so, after a good minute of suspense, they quickly slipped to the floor and under the stool. And, as they were to find, it was in fact better for them here, for apart from the dense darkness providing greater protection, they could cut down the risks of exposure in retreating to the cover of the bed and thence to freedom when their extraordinary instinct finally told them to abandon the now barely recognizable piece of loaf. The night, in any case, was slowly coming to an end, a hoarse cockerel was furiously crowing, an equally angry dog had begun to bark and thousands and thousands of sleepers, Mrs Eszter among them, sensed the coming of dawn and entered the last dream. The three rats, together with their numerous confrères, were scuttling and squeaking in the neighbour’s tumbledown shed among frozen cobs of well-gnawed corn, when, like someone recoiling from a scene of horror, she gave a disconsolate snort, trembled, turned her head rapidly from left to right a few times, beating it on the pillow, then, staring-eyed, suddenly sat up in the bed. She struggled for breath and looked wildly this way and that in the still twilit room before she recognized where she was and understood that everything she had just abandoned had ceased to exist, then rubbed her burning eyes, massaged her goosepimpled limbs, drew the discarded covers over her and slid down again with a relieved sigh. But there was no question of going back to sleep because as soon as the awful nightmare vanished from her consciousness it was replaced by the awareness of the day ahead and what she was to accomplish, and such a thrill of pleasurable excitement ran through her she couldn’t drop off again. She felt refreshed and ready for action, and decided there and then to get up, for she was convinced that deed should immediately and without hesitation follow on design, so she threw off the eiderdown and stood a little uncertainly on the freezing floor, then donned her quilted jacket, grabbed the empty kettle and went out into the yard to bring in some water for washing. She took a deep lungful of chilling air, glanced at the dome of funereal cloud above her and asked herself if there could be anything more bracing than these merciless, masculine winter dawns, when cowards hide their heads and those ‘called to life venture bravely forth’. If there was anything she loved it was this, the earth clapped under ice, the razor-sharp air, and the unyielding solidarity of cloud which firmly repulsed the weak or dreamy gaze so the eye should not be confused by the potential ambiguities of the clear deep sky. She let the wind bite viciously into her flesh as the flaps of her jacket flew apart, and though the cold was practically burning her feet under the worn wooden soles of her slippers, it never entered her mind to hurry about her task. She was already thinking of the water that would wash away the remaining warmth of the bed, but she was to be disappointed in this, for though she was particularly looking forward to crowning the whole experience of dawn in this manner, the pump wouldn’t work: the rags and newsprint they had tried to insulate it with had proved no defence against the withering cold, so she was forced to wipe away the scum on top of the water left in the basin from last night and, abandoning any idea of a thorough wash, to dab at her face and tiny breasts, and, likewise with her hairy lower torso, she had to be content with giving herself a military-style dry wipe, for ‘a person can’t be expected to squat over a basin as usual when the water’s so dirty’. Of course it upset her to have to forgo such arctic delights, but a little thing like this wouldn’t ruin her day (‘not this of all days …’), so once she’d finished wiping herself and imagined Eszter’s look of astonishment as, a few hours from now, he bent over the open suitcase, she dismissed the painful likelihood that she would ‘suffer from BO’ the rest of the day and busied herself mechanically fiddling with this and that. Her fingers fairly flew and by the time it was clear daylight she had not only dressed, swept up and made the bed but, having discovered the evidence of last night’s crimes (not that she minded them too much, for apart from having got accustomed to such things, she had developed something of an affection for these brave little revellers), she sprinkled the well-chewed remnant with a ‘trusty rat poison’, so ‘her sweet little bastards’ could feast themselves to kingdom come should they dare return to the room. And since there was nothing more to tidy, organize, pick up or adjust, with a superior smile on her lips she ceremoniously lifted the battered old suitcase off the top of the wardrobe, opened the lid, then knelt down beside it on the floor and ran her eyes over the blouses and towels, stockings and knickers stacked in orderly piles on the wardrobe shelves, and in a few minutes had transferred them all into the yawning depths of the suitcase. The clicking shut of the rusty locks, the pulling on of her coat and, after all the waiting, all the frustration, the setting out with only this lightest of burdens for company, of action in other words—this was precisely what she had longed for, the intoxicating fact of which went some way to explaining the degree to which she overestimated the significance and effect of her highly (perhaps too highly) planned