enough of her son, she couldn’t care less any more, he had done nothing but bring shame on her but no more, she could bear it no longer and she got her coat, said Mrs Virág, and there was nothing she could say to her’ (Mrs Harrer briefly registered Eszter’s dumb-founded expression) ‘she was off. I’ll drag him out of there by the hair if need be, she was screaming quite out of her mind, and Mrs Virág was really frightened, said my husband, as they stood in front of Nadabán’s shop, and she followed them and it was well past midnight and she still hasn’t returned, and heaven knows how many others have gone that way, sighed my husband. Then he left Mrs Virág and walked down the main road a little way, and the havoc, he said, sitting in a crumpled heap on the bed, as he turned down Jókai Street, which is where he bumped into the soldiers and naturally, he said, since it was us who invited the forces of order into town they didn’t even bother to check my papers but simply showed me the list with its ringed names and descriptions, because by that time they had interrogated the witnesses at the town hall, people who’d seen what had happened overnight, and the soldiers, my husband explained, were now divided into squadrons to keep the peace and seek out troublemakers, but the list they showed him in Jokai Street, says my husband, had only one or two names on it and the rest were descriptions as there wasn’t hardly anyone local on it, the rest were strangers and hooligans. And he’s just staring at this list and doesn’t want to believe the evidence of his eyes, like he didn’t want to believe Mrs Virág neither, and when the soldiers ask him if he recognizes anyone on the list he’s so scared he says he doesn’t although he does. In the meantime I’m lying on the bed as I hear his name and I don’t want to believe my ears, he’s gone mad, I think, but then he says there’s no time to waste as they’re out looking for him and the reason he’s come home was to put my mind at rest but that now I should get my clothes on and get over as fast as I can to the professor, since the two of them, him and the professor, owe him that much, but I keep looking at him wondering what he’s up to. I tell myself, I knew it, I knew what would come of him, I told them when he first appeared that we shouldn’t take him on, it’ll only mean trouble taking a fool on, but of course my husband wouldn’t listen to me, what’s the point, I thought, in taking on the local idiot, and for that money if you please, I’m not going anywhere, I’m not moving a step from here, I say to him, but at the same time I’m getting off the bed and pulling my coat on like an idiot myself. Then we’re out of the house with all the glass in the entrance and my husband says he’s off to look for him but he’ll shortly have to go to the town hall because the professor’s wife had made him promise to be there by seven at the latest, oh, I see, I say, by seven I’ll have to be alone again, all by myself, but he goes on protesting that this is the way things have to be, after having distinguished himself he’s got to keep his word and all, and he does have influence now and they made him promise to be there by seven. I beg him this and that and by this time we have reached the junction of Jókai Street and the main road, but I might as well be talking to the wall, and he says he’ll go as far as the station then come back and I should go over to the professor in case there’s something I can do for him, and it’s pointless me telling myself this is no good, not one step further, I was confused and came here anyway, looking neither left nor right as if I’d been struck blind, so I forgot even to say hello at the gate so I don’t know what the professor must think of me. I mean, to break in on someone just as dawn’s breaking you’d think it wouldn’t be too much to say hello, but I didn’t even do that, but what’s to be done, professor, a person’s mind gets into muddle when everything is collapsing about them, what with the army being here,’ Mrs Harrer dropped her voice, ‘and that tank …’ Eszter sat immobile on the edge of the bed, looking, the woman felt, straight through her. He was like a pillar of salt, that’s how he seemed when she had finished, she told Harrer afterwards, when she got home about noon. Then all she could see was her employer leaping from the bed, rushing to the wardrobe, ripping his coat from its hanger, and it was like he was responsible for everything, he cast one persecuted, fugitive glance at her, then stormed out of the house without a word. For her part, she remained seated in the armchair, blinking with fear, and when she heard the gate slammed loudly and furiously behind him, gave a shudder, burst into tears again, then unfolded her handkerchief, blew her nose and looked round the drawing room. It was only then she noticed the boarded-up windows. She rose slowly, then, because she could in no way comprehend what the boards were doing there, she walked over to them, gazing at them appraisingly, her face long and drawn. She ran a hand down one of the boards, then, having convinced herself that it was real, she gave all the others a little tap and with a slight pout, like any expert in the field, turned her back on the four panes of glass and concluded with a bitter sigh, mumbling, ‘Those nails should have been hammered in from the outside not from inside facing out!’ She shuffled back to the stove, had a look at the fire and threw a few more bits of wood on it, then, giving a shake of her head, turned off the light, took a last glance at the dark drawing room, and repeated, ‘Not in, but out …’
Not simply out of this ruined spot, to which their attention had clearly been called by the missing awnings beside the unusual sign, ortopéd, but back to ‘the innermost depths of hell from which you’ve emerged’, said the man in the corner, his eyes fixed in front of him, although the mouth swollen from beatings kept repeating the words, ‘Scram’ and ‘Out of here’ and ‘Hop to’, while they, as if it were precisely these bitter last words which signalled the end, paid not even the slightest attention to the petrified shoemaker, but stopped there in the wrecked workshop with precisely that sense of unspoken unity with which they had forced their way in, and simply abandoned their activities, left the upended cupboards full of leather, crossed the floor strewn with urine-soaked surgical shoes, slippers and boots, and were, every one of them, out in the street again. Though they were in no position to see it, they sensed from the memory of their mass dispersal, that the others—divided into groups of roughly similar size—were all there in the pitch darkness, not one of them missing, and, if anything, it was this knowledge that had instinctively prepared them for independent action that governed their progress on the march of destruction, for their cumulative fury dictated neither their targets nor their direction, merely that whatever act of wickedness they had committed they should trump it with an ever greater one—as now, when, having finished with the maker of surgical boots, their passions amenable to command yet unfettered by it, they set out to find the next appropriate target (not yet suspecting it would be their last), proceeding down the chestnut-tree-lined road into the town centre. The cinema was still on fire and in the scarlet light of the flames that occasionally shot up, three groups were seen hanging about the pavement, still as statues, watching the fire with a look of disgust, but, just as would happen later in the square when their companions met with a noticeably larger crowd by the now burning chapel, the way they came upon them enabled them to maintain their rate of progress during whatever remained of their terrifying unfinished expedition, ensuring that their otherwise slow but menacing pace should chime in with the even tempo of the march, which had been previously maintained from the cinema through to the entrance of the square and thence to the deserted silence of St Stephen’s Street behind the place of worship. Not a single word passed between them now, only the odd match flared briefly with the answering glow of the lit cigarette, their eyes being fixed on the back of the man in front or on the pavement as they moved almost unconsciously in step with the others in the freezing cold, and since they were well past the point at which they started, when they themselves had been frightened, smashing whole rows of windows if only that they should be able to see what was behind them, they left things untouched until they reached the nearest corner, when, bypassing the block which had first attracted their attention, they found the blue-enamel-covered iron gate that opened on the icy weed-infested park and a pair of darkened buildings within. Using their iron bars, a few blows were enough to smash the lock and devastate the porter’s lodge from which the porter had long fled, but having cut across one of the available paths they found it a much harder task breaking into the first house, because there, having prevailed upon the outer gate, they found themselves faced with two further doors which the inhabitants—having no doubt heard the news from the town and fearing the worst, in other words expecting precisely such an attack—had not only locked with the appropriate keys and bolted as far as possible, but barricaded with tables and chairs piled on top of each other, as if suspecting that they would have to do everything they could to resist the approaching power, with somewhat limited success, as the detachment even now swarming up the stairs demonstrated. The heated corridor that ran down the length of the raised ground floor was pitch dark and the night nurse, who, having heard the racket and was in these last moments attempting to escape by the back door along with those of her assistants who were still mobile, had switched off even the small night-lights in the various wards in the strange hope that by barricading the doors and turning off the lights she was ensuring the safety of her charges, if only because despite every instinct to the contrary no one really wanted to believe that the evil set loose in the street would take the form of a treacherous attack upon the hospital. But that it did, and it was as if it were precisely their silence that betrayed them, for once the last doors had been forced open and the light switches located in the corridor, those sheltering under their blankets in the first wards on the right were the first to be found and tipped out of their beds, but since at this point the mob had finally run out of ideas no one knew what to do with those writhing piteously on the floor: they felt a cramp in their arms as they went to touch them, there wasn’t strength enough in their legs to kick out at them, and so, as if to demonstrate that their destructive power was no longer capable of locating a target, their actual acts of destruction grew ever more ridiculous and their helplessness ever more patently clear. Because ultimately they wanted to distance themselves from what they had come to do, they merely swept through and passed on, tearing the sockets out of the wall and smashing against the same wall whatever instruments happened to be ticking or buzzing or glimmering, going on to throw whatever medication happened to be in the lockers on to the floor and stamping on bottles, thermometers and even the most innocuous items of personal possession, following this with the general destruction of glasses-cases, family photographs, and even the rotting remnants of fruit left in paper bags; now dividing into smaller units, now coming together again, they advanced in tides, but rather disorientated at meeting a completely unarmed victim, not understanding that the dumb fear, the utter lack of resistance which allowed that victim to bear this onslaught, was increasingly robbing them of power and that, faced by this sapping mire of unconditional surrender—though this is what had hitherto given them the greatest, most bitter pleasure—they would have to retreat. They stood under the flickering neon lights of the corridor at the very limits of silence (the distant screaming of the nurses was faintly audible behind closed doors) then, instead of seizing upon their prey again in fury and confusion or continuing their ravages on the upper floors, they waited for the last of their group to rejoin them then staggered out of the building like some ragtag army, all discipline lost, working their way back across the park to the iron gates to hesitate there for long minutes in the first clear indication of their lost momentum and indecisiveness, and if they no longer had any idea of where they should go or why, it was because, unbearable as it was to recognize and admit the fact that their infernal mission, like that of the exhausted detachments in front of the cinema and the chapel, had come up short, they had simply run out of murderous energy. The knowledge that they had made a crude rush at things and failed in their mission, the mission they had undertaken at a single gesture from their leader, to wipe out
everything,
suddenly imposed an intolerable weight on them, and when, after a period of confused meditation, they finally left the hospital gates, it was obvious that the possibility of the whole enterprise, including all their merciless acts of havoc and destruction, being senseless, so disorientated them that not only had their steps lost their previously uniform brisk tempo but their very
esprit de corps
was itself damaged in some way; the lethally disciplined squadron had become a pitiful rabble, the cohesive force of uncontrollable disgust had vanished to leave behind some twenty to thirty crumpled, introspective individuals who half suspected, half knew, but did not care what was to happen next because they had entered some empty, infinitely empty, terrain which not only had trapped them but was preventing them even forming the desire to escape. They smashed up one more shop (the sign above it said AUNDR OWROOM), but even as they were tearing off the grille and breaking the door open their every movement showed that they were embarking not on a new wave of destruction but on a retreat: it was as if each of them had been struck by a fatal bullet and, half collapsing, was seeking some last place of refuge where his miserable agony might be ended, and indeed, once having crossed the threshold, turned on the light and surveyed the place, packed as it was with washing machines—the premises reminded them more of a factory than a shop—there remained nothing in their eyes of that earlier ruthless look; having fallen prisoner to their own actions, locked into their own refuge, they felt it didn’t really matter where they were and for a long time listened expressionlessly to the creaking of the door they had left swinging behind them, only moving away from the entrance once its arresting siren song had died away in the freezing blank-faced showroom. One of them, as if suddenly coming to consciousness in the general nausea or recognizing for the first time the gravity of the situation afflicting his companions, curled his lip contemptuously, turned on his heels and, hissing something (‘… Shitheads! …’) behind him, loudly stamped his way out into the street again in an attempt to register some kind of protest, asserting his right to surrender, if surrender was called for, as an individual; another began hitting one of the machines ranged before them in precise and anonymous military order with an iron bar, then, seeking out its most sensitive points, succeeded in tearing the motor from its broken plastic casing and smashed the part into flying smithereens; the others, though, no longer registering the actions of the first two, did not touch anything but set uncertainly out along one of the narrow corridors formed by the ranks of machines and, wanting to put as much distance between themselves and anyone else, lay down on the lino-covered floor. To locate a sufficient distance, or to disperse in this forest of washing machines to the degree that they lost sight of one another—though this was what they most desired—was well nigh impossible, except for a few of them, but this minority certainly did not include Valuska, who, in any case—though this was no longer of any significance—took it for granted that that was the reason people remained close to him, and why, for example, the person sitting up, two rows away, looking in front of him with a sour expression, was busily scribbling in a little book, for, after all, someone had to note that the most ruthless of them all, his terrifying custodian, who had just departed having left behind him the memory of his bulk, his hat, his broadcloth coat and boots, not to mention his liberated victim, might himself, for all they knew, ‘have recovered himself’. It was all the same to Valuska whatever they intended to do with him; whether they decided to finish him off there and then or later was of no interest to him, for there was no fear left in him, nor did he try to escape, since the discovery that he had no desire to escape from whatever power inhabited this murderous and healing night was enough to make escape impossible; he might very well have escaped a particular group, for there were many opportunities to do that, but not the terrible burden they carried, from that there was to be no escape ever again—in so far as such a burden was perceptible to a person so utterly blinded in the first shocking and decisive moment of his complete rebirth. Because the awful helplessness he felt in front of Mr Eszter’s house when—prior to his later enlightenment—his friend in the market square rescued him, put his arm about him and they marched off down the main road ‘with the scrape and shuffle of boots and leggings’, and some hundred or so yards further down, at some literally silent word of command, began their assault upon the houses; and the terror he felt when he picked up their desperate momentum, when he might have rushed to the forefront, feeling the powerful grip of the comradely hand on his shoulder which every so often, as if by way of warning, tightened its grip and practically held him back; this helplessness and sheer terror at the dilemma he faced when, on the one hand, he wished to defend the person being beaten and, on the other, to be the person administering the beating, precluded either resistance or escape, nor did it allow him to suspect that from all those decades, from that entire forest of illusions, it should have been the one considered most irredeemably stupid, that is to say he himself, that this infernal night should so mercilessly have chosen. Valuska no longer knew where they were going, he registered only the beating down of another door, and, for the first time since they started, they had begun breaking all the windows and smashing the lights above the gateways, eventually pushing their way into one of the houses. With his apparently evil escort at his side, an escort who propelled him along with a justifiably relentless pleasure, he was swept with the mob into a little building where things began to happen in extraordinarily slow motion: even the sounds were slow as an old woman stepped in front of them, shouting, and a couple moved towards her with expressions of unbearable indifference on their distorted faces. He could still see the fist of one of them swinging in a relaxed fashion while the woman tried to back away but failed to move an inch—he could still see this—then, with a superhuman effort, as if every movement entailed the shifting of an enormous weight, he turned his head away and fixed his eyes on a corner of the terminally silent room. And there was nothing in that corner except a vague rolling shadow which slowly settled where the rotting floorboards entered the sharp angle of the wall which had none of the usual furniture to cover it, no bed, no wardrobe, quite bare with a sour smell—only the corner of a room could look so empty and smell so sour, and yet to Valuska’s eyes it was stuffed full of horrors, as if whatever happened or might have happened had soaked into it: it was like staring into the eyes of a leering monster he didn’t until then realize existed at all. Nor could he withdraw his gaze from it: however he was shoved about the room his eyes remained fixed there and saw nothing but that corner in the sharpest detail with its unmoving shadow which resembled nothing so much as a squatting dwarf that had been generated out of darkness and thick vapour; it blinded him, it burned into his consciousness, it held his eyes as if on a tight chain, and it didn’t matter now that they were leaving, he dragged it around with him wherever they went … He moved forward with them when they moved, he stopped when they stopped, but he was unconscious of all this, as he was of anything he did or that was done to him, and he remained in that state for a long long time, crushed by the weight of silence that had fallen on him, whatever racket they were making up ahead or immediately at hand. For hours, hours that could not be measured in terms of minutes or centuries, he dragged this terrible image round with him and was wholly oblivious to everything he suffered and by now he could not tell what was stronger, the chains with which it bound him or his own agonized desperation as he clung on to it. At one moment someone seemed to be lifting him off the ground, but the inappropriate power the other expended on this operation unbalanced him: ‘What makes him so light?’ the other muttered angrily and let him down again or rather shoved him furiously aside; then, much later, he thought he was lying on the pavement and they were pouring rough spirits into his mouth and this made him stand up again, and once more there was the hand on his shoulder or under his arm, the hand which presumably had more than once prevented him running away and which now powerfully gripped him and needlessly maintained its grip, for even if he had no idea that he might wake to his present state, the burden of the image he carried with him, the blank significance of the corner of that room, still exerted its influence: that was all he saw wherever he was tossed or pushed or swept, anything else simply flashed before him as they passed—a figure running, fire blazing, all in a mist. It was impossible, however he tried, to free himself of it, because as soon as he forgot it he remembered it again, and it made no difference where he was, in one place or another, he remained slave to the numbing power of its attraction—then, suddenly, a deathly fatigue overtook him, his half-frozen toes began to ache in his icy boots, he wanted to lie down on the pavement (had he done so before?) but the man in the broadcloth coat—Valuska could not quite see him as a tutelary presence yet—scratched his unshaven chin and offered some mocking reproof. These were the first words that penetrated his consciousness and the not unmerited derision in the voice (‘What’s up, half-wit, you want more brandy?’) reminded him where he was and whom he was with, and, as if that terrible corner with its timelessly sour smell had turned into a theatre-set with nightmarish lighting, accommodating the whole of this horrific night, he took in, for the first time, the fearsome, distorted features of his ‘teacher’. No, it wasn’t brandy he wanted, if he wanted anything at all, but sleep; he wanted to fall asleep and freeze to death on the pavement so he shouldn’t have to understand the experience that had begun to assume clearer contours in his mind, he just wanted it all to end, nothing more; fortunately, the manner and tone of the question left him in no doubt that he should promptly forget this idea, and, assuming that the question had somehow addressed his true desires, he shook his head violently, got up and, giving an involuntary shudder as he felt his companion laying his hand on his shoulder again, fell into step and obediently marched beside him. And he examined this face with the darkly blinding corner behind him; he noted its hawk-like nose, the thick stubble on its chin, the inflamed eyelids, the heavily abraded skin under its left cheekbone, and the frightening and complex thing wasn’t that he couldn’t sound the infinitely deep well of fury in it, but the resemblance it bore to the face he met yesterday in the market square; he had to understand that the man to whom his sudden and unforeseen attack of anxiety had led him in Kossuth Square, after his parting from Mr Eszter, was most certainly identical with the one who acted as his conductor in this carnival of hatred, and who now functioned—perhaps wholly involuntarily—as a surgeon mercilessly cutting his whole life open; there was nothing to disguise the fact that those frightening features were those of the man who was there the day before and the day before that, and so on, down to some wholly innocent original face; and that it was the cumulative effect of all of these faces, haunting, cold but wearing an entirely human expression that was practically aglow with the blinding certainty of its absolute power which promised new and supremely inventive forms of ruthlessness; that it was he who was directing each and every movement of this irresistible march, including Valuska’s own trials and tribulations as he stumbled down the desperate stations of complete collapse, though something in his manner suggested that the brutally instructive drama he unfolded before Valuska, while dragging him along by the arm, was in some way intended to serve as a form of cure, a cure that entailed a certain amount of necessary suffering (no gain without pain), and that this was a situation he was clearly enjoying. Valuska stared at that face, and as he examined it he began to understand that the ‘hauntingly cold’ expression he found on it was growing ever less enigmatic, since the ruthless mask might only be the unforgiving mirror of something that he, in his thirty-five years of muddle and sickliness, had perhaps been incapable of seeing, thought Valuska, but immediately modified that ‘perhaps’ to ‘no, absolutely certainly’, so that he should not leave unrecorded the decisive moment when he finally woke from his protracted slumber and stumbled on his own long-lost identity. The dumb silence broke, the blinding light behind his captor went out together with its unmoving shadow, and a little space, a park, came into focus as he looked around, a park and a path, then a set of iron gates, and he no longer felt any astonishment that it should be him alone, with his unforgivable blindness, and not the crowd gathered at the hospital, who was the alien creature here. Nothing of that astonishment remained, there was not the faintest necessity for flight, since the emptiness that had shuddered through him in those first few minutes had annihilated him too: pieces of him were rolling away for ever in all directions; he had disappeared in a single flash, had been reduced to nothing, so that the only thing he was aware of now was the hot, bitter taste of reality on his palate and an aching in his legs, particularly the left one. The unearthly fog, which in Wenckheim Avenue had presented these ugly functionaries of darkness as the unlikely creatures of a destructive yet magnetic power, lifted, and now, as he looked at them with new, suddenly acquired clarity of vision, and recalled them as they had been in their assembled hundreds, it seemed quite obvious to him that there wasn’t, nor had there ever been, anything otherworldly or alien about them, that they, and not only they but their ‘destructive and magnetic’ leader, had lost their ‘demonic’ quality; in fact, now the scales, which had grown ever larger, ever darker with years of looking at things the wrong way, had fallen from his eyes for ever, he knew himself disillusioned, free of the false comforts to which his dimwittedness had deservedly condemned him by hiding