understand
and his incapacity to deal with the scale of decay, it was here he first acknowledged this (‘like someone suffering from a hereditary form of blindness …!’): what he could not know, however, was that it was precisely what he then did that was the crowning glory of this intellectual incapacity, the true defeat. For having failed to notice how ‘the predicted collapse of forms he had for decades considered dislocated’ should not have proved surprising, especially for him, he had also avoided the admission—and in this matter he was quite happy to concur with his earlier position—that the whole enterprise was not only doomed but had actually run aground, the avoidance having taken the following form: he had decided that whatever it was he had seen out in the street was not worth devoting the least attention to, and if the town itself, in its changed circumstances, chose so patently to ignore his own being, which was based on the values of ‘intelligence and good taste’, the only course open to him was to ignore it in turn. He had believed, and was indeed perfectly justified in believing, that this ‘endless preparation’ was aimed expressly at him, since it was set on utterly annihilating that which in him had always resisted whatever was vulgar and destructive; it would crush reason, that exercise of free clear thinking, in order to rob him of the one last refuge where he could remain free and clear. The thought of that last refuge drove him closer to Valuska, and in his anxious solicitude for him he decided to demolish the few rarely used rickety old bridges that still existed between him and the world, to apply the rules of his earlier self-distancing from an ever more lawless society with even greater rigour, to leave this fatal stew to rot by itself and withdraw completely with only his friend for company. He would move to the other side of the river, Eszter decided, just past the waterworks, and in contemplating methods of turning his house in Wenckheim Street into a genuine fortress he bent every intellectual sinew to the task of maintaining absolute security: to maintaining it, or rather, to winning back everything the nightmare-like filth, the deserted street and the uprooted poplar had cast into doubt, while somehow retaining the hope that all the processes that constituted him might continue undisturbed. But he regained the first only at the expense of the second, since the price of his absolute security was precisely that he should not continue just as he was, should not continue because he could not continue, because, on their way back from that tiresome experience outside the White Collar Club, he had experienced a most curious feeling about what their common future might be like, about ‘the simple joys of resignation’. It was as if a great weight had fallen from his shoulders: he felt lighter and lighter and, having parted from Valuska at the corner of Hétvezér Passage, he had felt that lightness guiding him step by step and, regretting nothing, allowed himself to be led by it, recognizing that his identity, his very sense of selfhood, was being remorselessly dissolved in the process. In order to dissolve, to sink and emerge no more, there was one last thing he had to do: he had to draw the ultimate conclusion which was to decide that having arrived at the further shore in the land of blessed calm, he should ‘regard as a victory that which in actual fact was a bitter defeat’. He had to retreat to a point of inner security if only because the world outside had become a place of agonizing decay; he had to ignore the itch, the desire to intervene, for the purpose and significance of action were being corroded away by its thoroughgoing lack of significance; he had to distance himself because the only valid response of a sound mind to this process was to protest against it, or indeed to withdraw, to cut all contact with it and retain one’s distance (so Eszter had pondered as he made his way back home through the grinding cold), while at the same time continuing to pay attention to the increasingly meaningless state of things, to look long and hard at it, for to avert one’s eyes would be nothing short of cowardice, like substituting submissiveness for misapprehension, like running away from the truth that however he may have spoken up against ‘a world that was losing its grip on the law’ not for one moment had he ever lost touch with it. He had spoken up against it and had never ceased interrogating it, wanting to know why it was irrational; like a fly he kept buzzing in its ear and would not be waved away, but now the buzz was out of him, he had no desire left to keep buzzing because he understood that his tireless questioning and rebelling against the nature of things resulted not so much in the world becoming an adjunct to his intellect as in him becoming an adjunct to the world, the world’s prisoner if you like. He had been wrong, he decided a few steps from his house, wrong in assuming that steady decay was the essence of the situation, for that was in effect to say that some element of good persisted in it while there was no evidence of that whatsoever, and this walk had convinced him that there never could have been, not because it had been lost but because ‘the present state of the area’ never had the slightest shred of meaning in the first place. It was not meant to have a point; if it was meant for anything at all it was expressely for the purpose of having no point, Eszter had thought as he slowed and stopped before his entrance; it had neither decayed nor disintegrated under the pressure, since, in its own fashion, it was perfect and eternal, perfect without any hint of intention, as if the only order inherent in it was that which fitted it for chaos, and directing the heavy artillery of one’s intellect at it, peppering it day in, day out, desiring to take action against something that simply doesn’t exist nor ever will exist, to stare and stare at it until the eyeballs cracked, is not only exhausting (he fitted the key to the lock) but quite pointless. ‘I abjure thought,’ he had thought as he took a last look behind him. ‘Henceforth I will abjure all independent and lucid thought as if it were the crassest stupidity. I will deny the function of the mind, and, from this moment on, rely only on the inexpressible joy of my renunciation, on that only,’ Eszter repeated to himself. ‘No more showing off. I will be quiet at last, perfectly quiet.’ And he had turned the handle and entered, locking the door behind him. It was like being freed of a great weight and before he had even passed the threshold a wonderful sense of release flooded through him: it was as if he had left his old self, and everything that implied, out in the street, and had recovered his strength and all his old self-confidence, never to lose it again, until, step by step, he had lost it in the boarding up of the windows only to recover it, albeit in a different form, by the drawing-room window, not as a superior spirit passing judgement on ‘the terrible defects of the view outside’ but as one who responded humbly, knowing why things were as they were as if by instinct and therefore completely. What did it mean to think of this as something revolutionary, as indeed he did while contemplating his progress in the matter of nailing things from little details through to final adjustments and the extraordinary realization that sprang from it? The only revolutionary feeling he was aware of, or so he considered while standing in the doorway, was pride, his own pride, a pride that did not allow him to understand that there was no qualitative difference between things, a presumptuous over-confidence which condemned him to ultimate disillusion, for to live according to the spirit of qualitative difference requires superhuman qualities. Yet there was no real cause (he gently stroked one of the boards) for disillusionment, or rather there was no more cause for disillusionment than, for example, for wonder: in other words there was none; the fact that the human intellect was, unbeknown to itself, banished from the realm of ‘adjustment to the real nature of relationships between things’ did not necessarily imply that the universal anxiety implicit in the real nature of these relationships lacked all sense; nor did the fact that the human subject was merely an acquiescent servant to eternal anxiety necessarily imply a stark choice between disillusionment and wonder. If some frozen magical realm disappeared in the moment following that flash of enlightenment, its after-shocks did not, and he simply stood in the living wake of the fled vision feeling it pulse through him; nor could what he then felt be described as either disillusionment or wonder, it was more like being the recipient of a bequest, an acceptance of the fact that the nature of the vision far transcended him, a kind of patience, a kind of resignation to the will of the special grace which allowed him to comprehend only as much as he was capable of comprehending. And in that moment he understood that the apparently momentous decision he had taken while standing in the doorway was pure childish ignorance, that his opinions about the terrible gap in the intelligibility and rational development of things were based on gross error, the cumulative error of ‘some sixty years’, sixty years of living with a metaphorical cataract in one’s eye which, naturally, prevented him seeing what he now saw so clearly; that mind (he meditated the complex lines of the grain in one of the boards) was not so much a painful lacuna in the world-order as an integral part of it, the world’s shadow. It was the world’s shadow because in its eternal agitated dialogue it moved in synchronicity with the instincts that governed our being and that was its task, to interpret this phenomenon in all its delicacy and complexity, not to tell us anything about the purpose of the dialogue, since the thing it shadowed would not inform us about anything but the nature of its own movement. To be more accurate, Eszter continued, it was only a shadow in the mirror, a mirror where the image and the mirror wholly coincided though the shadow nevertheless tried to separate them, to separate two things that had from eternity been the same and could not be separated or cut into two, thereby losing the weightless delight of being swept along within it, substituting, he thought as he stepped away from the drawing-room window, a solid eternity purchased with knowledge for the sweet song of participating in eternity, a song so airy it was lighter than a feather. He moved towards the door, his head bowed. That’s how it will be, like a withdrawn invitation, the whole intellectual process ‘finding itself precisely by discarding the role of the intellect, finding itself, or rather finding something else that persists in existing despite the odds, that self which by wandering through the labyrinth of its own nature leaves behind confused memorials which bear witness both to invitation and to withdrawal. And that’s how it will be, contemplated Eszter as he ambled on: the intangible contents of the ‘world’ that arises out of this dialogue which is itself so resistant to interpretation and which raises the insoluble question of ‘what, after all, is the point?’, act as a warning to the insatiable, a net to catch infinity, a language to capture that which is brilliant, and that is how one becomes two, the thing itself and its significance. That significance, like a hand, would first trace then gather up the apparently stray threads of this mysterious mixture, would hold them together like mortar in a brick wall, but—and here he smiled, feeling the radiant heat of the fire as he approached it—even if this hand, much like his own, were to release the strands, this dialogue of opposing forces would go on, nor would the wall collapse. It would not collapse, just as he himself would not collapse, but he had to let go of all he had once clung on to, for this was a vital part of the process of simple realization, the realization that knowledge led either to wholesale illusion or to irrational depression, and by the time he had returned from the drawing room into the hall he was not ‘thinking’ as such any more, which is not say he had ‘given up’ thinking or ‘retracted’ what he had thought up to this point but that he acknowledged the fact that he was liberated from the passion of self-referential questioning, and through this liberation—similar to the kind he had experienced on the afternoon when following his encounter with Frachberger he relinquished music, but this time perhaps, in a genuinely revolutionary fashion—he could bid farewell to the illusions that led to such terrible depressions. Farewell to those countless moments of consciousness when he was forever losing the status he had tried so stubbornly to maintain, farewell to the idiotic necessity of making decisions, for now, at last, he was capable of ‘assessing’ his own situation correctly; farewell to all that, it was over, thought Eszter, and, on this extraordinary evening, he could practically hear the loud rumble as his whole previous life collapsed around him, and if life had been one constant rushing about before this—a rush ‘forward’, a rush to ‘achieve’ something, a rush to ‘escape’ from something—and having finished his tour of inspection and arrived back at the very last board he had hammered in, he took it for granted that he had succeeded in halting the onward rush, had finally landed with his feet on the ground rather than bouncing off again, had, after all that preparation, finally arrived reassuringly ‘somewhere’. He stood in the relative gloom with his arms by his sides, the hammer in his lowered hand, with the genuine ‘smell of success’ in his nostrils, gazing at one of those notable nails, or rather at a gay little pinpoint of light that might have been produced by the light trickling from the open door of the drawing room (he had neglected to shut it) or, perhaps, by the weak effulgence of the ceiling light above him; he gazed at it as if it were the full stop at the end of a sentence, since, here and now, it signalled the end not only of his circular tour but of his last train of thought, so that after his extended detour and eventual ‘release from the massive weight of thinking’ he should find himself back where he started, returning home with a never-before-experienced sense of lightness. Having been granted a glimpse into the true nature of relationships, having just now experienced the adventure of comprehending and realizing, having recovered from the extraordinary effort of recognizing in a very unlikely manner the unlikely manner in which he had arrived at the decisive moment of resignation, the happy little glimmer on the head
of the nail conjured nothing more or less than a mysterious, unforgettable sensation that had surprised him on his way home, that despite the apparently insufferable condition of the town, he was glad simply to be alive, glad that he was breathing, that Valuska would soon be here beside him, glad of the warm glow of the fire in the drawing room and of the house, which henceforth would be a real home, his home (Eszter looked about him) where the tiniest thing possessed some significance, and so he put the hammer down on the floor, divested himself of Mrs Harrer’s apron and hung it on the hook in the kitchen and returned to the drawing room so he could rest a little before lighting a fire in Valuska’s room. It was a mysterious sensation but one that was born of simplicity rather than complexity: everything about him regained its original significance in the most natural way, the window became a window you could look out of again, the fire became a fire which gave out heat, and the drawing room ceased to be a refuge from ‘all-consuming devastation’ in much the same way as the outside world was no longer the scene of ‘insufferable torture’. It was through that outside world that Valuska was roaming, perhaps hurrying (if he was keeping his promise); so he lay down and slowly spread himself across the bed, reminding himself that the scene outside the window was no longer identical with the one he had seen that afternoon, and that therefore, maybe, or so something whispered to him, the nightmarish rubbish there, like the odours or poisons rising from some magical ‘Slough whose name was Despond’, was merely the vision of a sick mind, the vision of a sick mind that after a long sojourn in darkness found an object on which it might project its fantasies; for one could regard the accumulation of rubbish outside, just as one might regard the fears of the irrational and confused populace, as something that could eventually be tidied up. But this possibility of cleansing and regeneration was only a momentary thought, for the drawing room now occupied his entire attention: the furniture, the carpet, the mirror and the lamp, the cracks in the ceiling and the joyful flames leaping in the fire. He couldn’t explain, however he tried, the feeling that he was here for the first time, that this refuge from ‘human stupidity’ had suddenly become an invulnerable island of peace, reconciliation and grateful satiety. He had taken everything into account: old age, loneliness, the possible fear of death, the sense of yearning beyond some ultimate calm, the notion of being in the grip of choking panic at seeing his horrific predictions come true; the possibility that he had gone mad, that the sudden turnaround in his life represented a cowardly retreat from the genuine dangers of taking further thought, that it was the cumulative result of all the foregoing, but whichever way he looked at it none of these seemed sufficient reason for his current condition, indeed, he considered, nothing could be more sober, more balanced than the attitude with which he now surveyed the world. He adjusted his deep-claret-coloured smoking jacket, linked the fingers of his hands together behind his neck, and, as he noticed the feeble ticking of his watch, suddenly realized that he had been escaping all his life, that life had been a constant escape, escape from meaninglessness into music, from music to guilt, from guilt and self-punishment into pure ratiocination, and finally escape from that too, that it was retreat after retreat, as if his guardian angel had, in his own peculiar fashion, been steering him to the antithesis of retreat, to an almost simple-minded acceptance of things as they were, at which point he understood that there was nothing to be understood, that if there was reason in the world it far transcended his own, and that therefore it was enough to notice and observe that which he actually possessed. And he really had ‘retreated into an almost simple-minded acceptance of things as they were’, because now, as he closed his eyes for a few minutes, he was aware of nothing but the velvety parameters of his home: the protective embrace of the roof over his head, the security of the rooms between which he could freely pass, the permanent half-light of his book-lined hall which faithfully followed the right-angled plan of the building and seemed to convey the calm of the garden, which looked neglected right now, but would be flowering by the time spring came round; he seemed to hear anew the sound of footsteps—Mrs Harrer’s buttoned slippers, Valuska’s boots—sounds that had etched themselves deep into his memory; could taste the air outside and smell the dust within; was aware of the soft swelling of the floorboards and the practically edible haze around the individual light bulbs in the lamp; and he knew that all these, the tastes, scents, colours, sounds—the beneficial sweetness of the wholly circumscribing shelter—differed from the delights conjured by a happy dream only in that there was no need to keep conjuring them up, because they had not passed away, because they existed and would, Eszter was certain, continue to exist. And so sleep overtook him and when he woke a few hours later it was to the warmth of the pillow under his head. He did not open his eyes straight away, and because he thought that he had been asleep only a few minutes as he had intended, the warmth of the pillow brought to mind the protective air of the house as it seemed just before he fell asleep and he thought he could pick up the grateful review of his worldly wealth precisely at the point that he had left it. He felt there was time to sink into the peaceful silence which hugged him as close as did the blanket his body, into the impregnable order of permanence where everything remained as it was, where furniture, carpet, mirror and lamp waited undisturbed to receive him, and where there would be time to take stock of the tiniest detail and discover every part of what now revealed itself to be his inexhaustible treasure trove, gauging, in his imagination, the distance between his current position and the hall, a distance that seemed to be constantly increasing, but one that would soon be entered by the one person who would give meaning to all of this: Valuska. Because every element of this ‘beneficial sweetness’ referred to him: Valuska was the cause and subject of every process, and though he had suspected it, he had not been so keenly aware that this decisive turn in his life was not the result of some intangible accident but the work of the only person who had visited him these many long years, the man who acted as the mysterious antidote to his own daily more refined sense of bitterness, the true lineaments of whose face and whose terrible vulnerability he had only just now, in his half-asleep half-awake state, perceived in all its striking essence, or rather, had discovered earlier today, on the way back home from the Chez Nous Café. On the way back from there, but first, properly, in Hétvezér Passage, shortly after glimpsing the café and the fallen tree, when, shaken by the sight and thinking himself quite alone, the thought flashed through his mind that he was not in fact alone; it was a moment, almost an insignificant micro-second of consciousness, but so unexpected, so deep, that it was immediately transformed into anxiety for his companion, a process that took place so quickly the thought disappeared into it; disappeared, absorbed into his anxiety, into his decision to withdraw when faced by the intolerable imbalance he saw in town which provided him with unquestionable proof of the nameless elements of that realization, without any idea what he was surrendering to in escaping into plans of their future life together. Nor did this vague and cloudy sensation leave him, it hovered over him every step of the way home, in the full overview of the happenings of the afternoon and evening: it hid there like a secret explanation as to why he should feel so tearful at the moment of their separation; it was to this that ‘the unprecedent lightness of heart he had experienced on his way home’ testified; it was there in the decision he took in the gateway, in every detail of the steps he took to barricade the house and in the tour of inspection and readjustment afterwards; and, finally, it was there in the new wealth of meaning to be discovered in his own imperium: in every corner of the house, in the half-light of his waking dream, at the very axis of all the events of this extraordinary day, there stood Valuska, fully revealed now for the first time. He felt that he could see what it was that touched him, was convinced that he grasped it immediately, at the very beginning, the thing he now confronted like an image carved into stone, for it was only one image that actually nourished him, one image that resulted in him changing the course of his entire life. In fact, looking back at it, he thought, he couldn’t help but recognize it, for then, back at the ‘flash of intuition’, it appeared with a tidal force, something ungovernable, silent, that drove you forward without you noticing. In that particular moment, leaving the Chez Nous Café behind, having passed the sadly fallen tree, somewhere between the coffee house and the fur-trader’s, he, Eszter, had stopped, arrested by an overwhelming mixture of indignation and untold despair, and, putting out his arm, had stopped Valuska in his tracks too. He said something, pointed to the rubbish as if to ask his companion whether he too had noticed it, and, glancing at him, noticed merely that the look of shining attention—the ‘glow’, as he described it—which had only lately left Valuska’s face had now returned. An instinct told him that something had happened the instant before to challenge and question that look, and he stared harder but found nothing to confirm the hunch, so continued on his way—already yielding to his unconscious thought—without suspecting anything: genuinely unsuspecting, but having solved everything, he thought as he woke from his half-dozing state into full consciousness, the whole incident with Valuska resolving into a tableau, a manifestation touching in its simplicity, and everything that had happened in the course of the afternoon and evening finally and forcefully coming into focus. What he then felt, he now saw: his trusty protector standing there beside him, his shoulders sagging, his head bowed, with the houses of Hétvezér Passage all around him, as the other he, his old enfeebled friend Eszter, pointed at the rubbish; his shoulders sagging, his head bowed, not as the tell-tale sign of a sudden attack of melancholy, but, and the realization almost broke his heart, because he was resting; resting because he too had tired, having practically had to carry someone who could hardly stand on his own feet; resting, furtively, as if he were a little ashamed of having to rest, as if he could not imagine burdening his fellow with the confession of his own weakness while he looked on: he could see it now again just as it had been. He saw the sagging shoulders and the postman’s cloak as it rucked up over the bent back, saw the bowed head as a few stray wisps of hair escaped from his cap to hang over his eye, saw the bag slung crosswise over his shoulder … and, lower down, the worn-out boots … and he felt he knew everything there was to know about this tragic image, that he understood perfectly everything that could possibly be understood about it. Then he had a vision of Valuska on a previous occasion, a long time ago—was it six, seven or even eight years ago? He couldn’t remember exactly—when, following Mrs Harrer’s advice (‘What we need round here, I tell you, is a man, someone to get your meals in!’) that very afternoon, he made his first appearance in the drawing room, closely trailing behind her; how he shyly explained what he was doing there, protesting that he’d rather not accept the money offered, and, furthermore, would happily undertake, ‘free of charge’, whatever errands Mr Eszter chose to entrust him with, such as going to the shops or posting a letter, or, from time to time, tidying the yard if there were the opportunity—how he added, rather apologetically, as if it were the owner of the house that was doing