‘testes vis maior’
etc., a decision that was made quickly, not so much because he was frightened out of his wits, but because he immediately perceived that, being as unwilling as he was to engage in warfare and wishing to avoid the worst, it was the only position he could adopt; he had, in effect, to yield to blackmail without the least struggle and not to think about it any longer, though this did not apply to the thought of having to move out; indeed, after having entrusted Valuska with the task of ‘disinfecting’ the place by depositing the suitcase—temporarily—at the furthermost point of the house (‘The suitcase, at least, can be moved, if not the sense of her presence …’), he hesitated in front of the wardrobe in some confusion. It wasn’t that he doubted his judgement, he simply didn’t know where to begin and what to do next, and like someone who has for a minute forgotten one part of a sequence of movements, he stood there, staring at the wardrobe door, opening and shutting it again. He opened it and shut it, then returned to his bed so that he might set out for the wardrobe again, and since, at this point, the hopelessness of his situation dawned on him, he tried to concentrate on one thing at a time and decide whether he should choose his dull sky-grey suit or the black one, which was more fitted to such a funereal occasion. He vacillated between the two, choosing now this, now that, but failed to reach any decision about his shirt or tie or shoes or even his hat, and if Valuska hadn’t suddenly begun to rattle about with the lunch-box in the kitchen and startled him with the noise, he would probably have remained in this state of indecision well into the evening and not have realized it was neither the grey nor the black he wanted but a third option, something that might offer him protection out there, a suit of armour ideally. Ideally, he would have preferred to choose not between jackets, waistcoats and overcoats but between helmets, breastplates and greaves, for he was all too aware that the ridiculous humiliation entailed in what he was forced to do—Mrs Eszter turning him into the equivalent of a street cleaner—would be as nothing compared to the potentially fatal real difficulties he would soon encounter; after all, it was about two months since he had last attempted a short walk down to the nearest corner. These difficulties included the moment he first made contact with pavement and air, with all those distances impossible to judge, with the perils he might have to face once he entered on the symbolic dialogue between ‘roof ridges willing themselves to collapse and the suffocating sweetness of starched net curtains’, not to mention what one might call the usual ‘chances one takes in the street’ (complication upon complication!), such as meeting the first, the second, then all the other citizens who were bound to come his way. He had to stand there, steady as a rock, holding his peace, while they mercilessly gave vent to their joy at seeing him again; he had to hold firm while miscellaneous people indulged their legally sanctified lack of restraint and laid the full complement of their psychological problems at his feet, and, worst of all—and here he grew melancholy at the thought—he must remain deaf and blind to all their stifling imbecility in case he should be lured into the truly sickening trap of showing sympathy or commit himself to an act of participation that might prove irreversible, predicaments he had avoided by withdrawing from society and ‘enjoying the well-earned blessings of angelic indifference’. Trusting that his friend-in-need would relieve him of some aspects of his task, he did not concern himself with the manner in which he might go about them: it was of no consequence to him whether he finished up organizing a sewing circle, winning a pot-plant competition or leading this clearly obsessed movement dedicated to sweeping changes, and since he devoted all his energy to resisting such grotesque visions, having finished dressing and taking a last look in the mirror at his impeccable outfit (grey, as it happened), he briefly entertained the faint likelihood of returning from the horrible prospect of his walk unscathed, when his aperçus about the sorry state of the world and his general thoughts, which were far harder to put into words, concerning as they did such subjects as the sparks emitted by the fire in the fireplace and the evanescence of their ‘evil if enigmatic significance’, might be continued precisely where—owing to Mrs Eszter’s foreseeable yet surprising demands—they had so regrettably left off. This was a faint possibility, he thought, but it would call for tremendous exertions in the face of potentially fatal difficulties; and as he passed the ever thinner double row of books in the hall with Valuska in his wake (Valuska was cheerfully dangling the lunch-box by now), and crossed the twilit threshold of the building to reach the street outside, the air he breathed seemed sharp as poison and he grew so dizzy that instead of worrying about ‘being overwhelmed by the tide of middle-class manners’ what really concerned him was whether his legs would support him in the confused and fluid space, and whether it wouldn’t be wiser to consider retreating there and then, ‘before,’ he added as if answering another question, ‘the lungs, the heart, the sinews and muscles could answer for themselves with a resounding no’. It was tempting to go home, lock himself away in the drawing room and insulate himself with cushions and rugs in pleasant warmth, but he couldn’t seriously consider it, since he knew what to expect if he ‘disobeyed orders’: it was equally tempting to bash the monster’s head in. He sought support from his walking stick and his suddenly anxious friend leapt to his assistance (‘There’s nothing wrong, is there, Mr Eszter, sir?’), and eventually he regained his balance and dismissed all thought of resistance from his mind, and concentrated on accepting the dizzy state of the world that was spinning round him as a perfectly natural state of affairs, at which point he took a tight grip of Valuska’s arm and continued on his way. He continued on his way, having decided that Valuska, his guardian angel—either because he was scared of the woman or because he was overjoyed at being able to show him his old haunts—was prepared to haul him through the streets even in his half-dead state, and so, muttering something to allay his fears (‘No, it’s nothing … nothing really’), he kept the true details of his disorientating dizziness and progressive weakening to himself; and while the latter, satisfied that there was nothing to hinder their walk, embarked on an enthusiastic monologue about the dawn birth of that mush of icy mist rolling about them, under whose riveting spell he seemed to have fallen as if for the first time, Eszter, quite beyond the hopes of a few moments ago and truly deaf and blind by now, gave all his attention to keeping his balance, placing one foot in front of another, so that they might at least reach a resting place at the nearest corner. He felt as if he had developed cataracts on both his eyes and was swimming through some foggy void: his ears were ringing, his legs shaking and a hot flush ran through his entire body. ‘I might faint …’ he thought, and rather than fearing such a spectacular loss of consciousness, he actually desired it, for it dawned on him that if he were to collapse in the street, surrounded by a huddle of frightened bystanders, and be carried home on a stretcher, Mrs Eszter’s plan might be ruined and he could escape from the trap by the simplest means possible. Ten more steps, he calculated, might be enough for this fortunate turn of events to take place; to realize that no such turn might be expected took him no more than five. They were passing the higher numbers in Eighteen Forty-Eight Street when, instead of collapsing, he suddenly began to feel better: his legs no longer shook, the ringing in his ears ceased, and, to his greatest annoyance, even the sense of dizziness left him; in other words he had no excuse left for cutting short his walk. He stopped to find he could hear and see once more, and once he saw he was forced to look around and take account of the fact that something had certainly changed since his last excursion into ‘this hopeless bog of a town’. He couldn’t pin down what precisely it was, not at any rate in those first few moments of flickering confusion, but though he couldn’t isolate the phenomenon he had nevertheless to acknowledge that Mrs Harrer’s chattering had not been entirely beside the point. Not entirely beside the point, that was true, but a voice inside him whispered that Mrs Harrer hadn’t quite got the essence of the thing, for, by the time they had taken a breather at the corner of the avenue and the main trunk road, and he had taken ‘proper stock of the matter’, it became apparent to him that, contrary to the opinion of his loyal cleaner, his ‘beloved birthplace’ did not have the look of a town just waiting for the end of the world but rather of one that had survived it. What surprised him was that instead of the usual look of aimless idiocy on the faces of passers-by—an expression of endless patience also adopted by those who peeked from windows in anxious expectation of some great event, in other words ‘the usual dungheap smell of spiritual lethargy’—Wenckheim Avenue and the surrounding streets wore a hitherto unrecognized air of desolation and a look of speechless and arid neglect had replaced the ‘monstrous vacancy’ he was used to. It was strange that while the generally deserted neighbourhood suggested the aftermath of some cataclysmic event, all the incidentals and accidentals of life—contrary to what you would expect in the case of imminent plague or radiation sickness, when everyone would flee in panic—were still in place, looking as permanent as ever. All this was strange and surprising, but what he found most shocking—once he realized it—was that the answer to this conundrum that even a blind man could not help but be aware of and which he himself instinctively and immediately recognized, an instinct which told him that he had entered a terrain that had undergone some scandalous transformation, lay out of his reach despite the fact that as each minute passed he grew ever more convinced that there was an answer, but it was in the form of some hidden clue which even if he could spot—and clearly it had to be visible—he would be unable to recognize: it was something in this gradually more focused image—the silence, the desolate mood, the soulless perfection of the deserted streets—a point of rest on which everything else stood. He leaned with half a shoulder against the wall of the gateway that served as their resting place, gazing at the buildings opposite, taking in the enormity of their voids, their windows and lunettes and the patchwork effect they created as they melted into the spaces between joists, then, while Valuska chattered away, he held his hands against the stucco behind his back in case the crumbling condition of the substance between his fingers might tell him what had happened. His gaze took in the storm-lamps and the pillars covered in advertisements; he observed the bare tops of the chestnut trees and let his eyes run down both ends of the main road, seeking an explanation in terms of distance, size or discrepancy in proportions. But he found no answer there, so he tried to locate an axis that might impose some meaning on the town’s ostensible disorder, looking ever further afield in his effort, until he was forced to admit that it was hopeless searching for a clear overview under a dark sky like this that made early afternoon look like dusk. This sky, Eszter decided, this incomprehensible mass, this complex weight that had settled across them, had not changed its character, not in the slightest detail, and since this suggested that to conceive of even the most minor modulation of its surface was an absolute waste of time he determined to abandon the search and stifle his curiosity, putting the failure of his ‘first instinctive reaction’ down to the erratic functioning of an overstretched nervous system. To hell with it, he decided, acknowledging that he could not count on a favourable resolution to the so-far-steady improvement in his generally lamentable condition, and, as if to underline this, had fixed his ostensibly wandering attention on what Valuska’s ringing words declared to be ‘that eternal herald of good tidings’, the indifferent dome of the sky, when, suddenly, like the proverbial absent-minded professor who discovers his lost glasses at the end of his own nose, he realized that he should not be looking up but down at his feet, since what he was looking for was there, there to the extent that he was standing on it. He was standing on it, had been treading its surface all along, and was fated to proceed along it in the immediate future, and as he noted this, he put his belated recognition of it down to the fact that it was all too obvious, too close, and its unsuspected proximity was the problem; it was because he could touch it, indeed walk all over it, that he had ignored it, and he was furthermore convinced that when, in those first few moments, he had sensed that there was something ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘shockingly revolutionary’ about it, he was far from mistaken. It was not the bare fact that was so astonishing, since, by some tacit agreement, the town—its capacity for civic enthusiasm being strictly limited—regarded every piece of common ground as a kind of no man’s land, with the result that for several years now no one had bothered with the so-called ‘issue’ of road maintenance. It wasn’t even the unusual quality of the tide of the stuff that startled him, but its quantity, which Eszter, unlike the twenty thousand or so pedestrians, including Mrs Harrer, who daily trod the pavements—and had she taken particular notice of it she would certainly not have failed to let him know—considered fantastic beyond his wildest dreams. His ostensible response was a simple, ‘Well, well …’ but he was horrified: it was impossible, you couldn’t throw away, you couldn’t drag here such an enormous volume of it, and, since what he saw far exceeded anything that might have been credibly explained to an individual of normal intelligence, he felt that, taking the scale of this extraordinary and ‘monstrous work of havoc’ into account, he might be justified in risking the opinion that ‘the exclusively human capacity for mind-numbing levels of neglect and indifference was, beyond a doubt, truly limitless’. ‘The amount of it! The sheer amount of it!’ He shook his head and, dropping any pretence of listening
to Valuska’s interminable discourse, attempted to take in the extent of this monstrosity, this all-pervading deluge, able at last, for the first time, now, at roughly three o’clock in the afternoon, to give a name to that which had so strangely disorientated him. Rubbish. Everywhere he looked the roads and pavements were covered with a seamless, chinkless armour of detritus and this supernaturally glimmering river of waste, trodden into pulp and frozen into a solid mass by the piercing cold, wound away into the distant twilight greyness. Apple cores, bits of old boots, watch-straps, overcoat buttons, rusted keys, everything, he coolly noted, that man may leave his mark by, was here, though it wasn’t so much this ‘icy museum of pointless existence’ that astonished him (for there was nothing remotely new about the particular range of exhibits), but the way this slippery mass snaking between the houses, like a pale reflection of the sky, illuminated everything with its unearthly, dull, silvery phosphorescence. The awareness of where he was exercised an increasingly sobering effect on him—he had by no means lost his capacity for calm appraisal—and as he continued to appraise, as if from a considerable eminence, the monstrous labyrinth of filth, he grew ever more certain that, since his ‘fellow human beings’ had utterly failed to notice this flawless and monumental embodiment of doom, it was pointless talking about a ‘sense of community’. It was, after all, as if the earth had opened up beneath him, revealing what lay underneath the town, or, and he tapped at the pavement with his stick, as if some terrible putrescent marsh had seeped through the thin layer of asphalt to cover everything. A marsh in a bog, thought Eszter, the essential