The Melancholy of Resistance (24 page)

Provaznyik was the doctor’s name and his impromptu appearance, while unheralded, did not surprise Eszter one bit, but not for the simple reason that he lived nearby, but because it seemed to be an unmistakable sign that his most terrifying fears and apprehensions were justified; it justified his notions of what he was about to see and perfectly fitted into the picture in which a doctor’s presence needed no explanation, for, after all, what else would he be doing other than the round of the streets with the soldiers, separating the wounded from those whom Mrs Harrer had earlier referred to as the victims. ‘If I were you,’ Provaznyik shook his head once they had attained what he judged to be a reasonable distance between themselves and the others and he had stopped, ‘I wouldn’t bother to look. Such sights are not for people like you, believe me …’ he stated with all the objective authority of an expert who knows that the less the layman understands of such spectacles the more hysterically he tends to react, though experience told him that the most kindly intended warning often elicited the most directly contrary behaviour. And this was precisely the case here, for Eszter was by no means deterred by his well-meant advice, quite the opposite in fact, for if there had remained in him the merest capacity for self-control, the last two sentences obliterated it and he tried to wrench himself free of the doctor’s grip so as to rush directly over to the crowd and, if necessary, break through the ring by force, but since Provaznyik was not prepared to relinquish his grip quite so easily, he made a few more puny efforts to free himself then suddenly gave up the struggle, bowed his head, and asked only, ‘What happened?’ ‘I can’t tell you anything for certain yet,’ the doctor answered gravely after taking a little thought, ‘strangulation seems likely, or that at least is what the immediate evidence seems to indicate. The poor victim,’ he relaxed his grip, and threw his arms wide in indignation, ‘obviously cried out and the murderers had to stop the noise.’ But Eszter was beyond hearing the end of his speech and had set out towards the crowd again, so Provaznyik, satisfied that the other had calmed down a little, no longer tried to prevent him but merely gave a wave of resignation and followed him, while Eszter, though not entirely calm, was certainly not the impetuous force he had been; he did not run and, having reached the ring, did not push anyone out of the way, but merely touched the shoulders of a few of them so that he and the doctor might be let through. People turned and drew silently aside, immediately forming a corridor he could pass down through the tight ring which immediately closed about him leaving no way out, imprisoning him like a trap, so he was forced to look at the body lying spread-eagled on the ground, its arms flung wide, the mouth open, the eyes starting from their sockets as the head lolled over the edge of the pavement into the gutter, and was obliged to meet that frightened fixed stare which was no longer in any position to betray the perpetrator of the deed, the head that could no longer speak but would appear merely to be listening, having turned to stone, like his own that could no longer tell what it found most shocking: to see and understand the significance of ‘someone’s life leaving the body for ever’ in such a terrible way, or—though at this particular moment the thing he saw before him was more than familiar—to discover that it wasn’t what he expected to find. The corpse did not have a coat, only a flannel suit and a green sweater that had become completely twisted, and, since it was impossible to know how long it had lain here, it seemed very likely that it would soon be frozen if it wasn’t so already, a matter only Provaznyik was competent to judge, and he, having avoided Eszter, was already engaged in his presumably interrupted examination, and the crowd drew closer, following the doctor’s every movement, and began to mumble speculatively about whether the leg or the wrist or the neck might break if it were lifted—as if the most important question was whether the body could be transported or not. As a consequence the space in the middle shrank even further and the guardians of the corpse, two soldiers engaged in an attempt to talk to a woman who appeared incapable of speech, interrupted their interrogation and called on the bystanders to step back, or else, they warned, ‘they would be made to disperse’ and by the time people had grudgingly retreated, they themselves had given up trying to elicit a few inarticulate words from the witness, whose face, in any case, was almost wholly covered by the handkerchief she was sobbing into, and had also started watching Provaznyik as he gently flexed the dead one’s jaw and then proceeded tenderly down the limbs. Eszter was aware of none of this, all his energy being absorbed in the effort of wrenching his eyes from the other’s horrific gaze, though he could only avoid this petrifying image of death when the doctor, as he moved around the body, interposed his own form between them for a couple of minutes; from that moment on no one existed for him except Provaznyik; his eyes were practically glued to him so he shouldn’t have to confront that image again, not for an instant, and because he was sure that this ad hoc coroner had not so much misunderstood as deliberately misled him before, he skirted the corpse with him and once the other got down on his haunches in order to continue the examination, he stood behind him and bellowed, ‘Valuska, doctor! Tell me, have you found Valuska?!’ At mention of his name the crowd suddenly stopped their mumbling, the woman cast a panicky glance at the soldiers and they glanced at each other as if this precisely had been their topic of conversation, and, while the doctor, who didn’t even glance up at Eszter, shook his head (then whispered to him by way of warning, ‘But from what I hear it’s not a good idea to talk about that now …’), one of them took out a sheet of paper and ran his finger down the lines of writing, stabbing at it at one point, and showed it to his colleague, who then fixed his eyes on Eszter and boomed at him, ‘János Valuska?’ Yes,’ Eszter turned to them, ‘he’s the one I mean, the very man,’ at which they called on him to tell them everything he knew of the ‘individual in question’, and since he understood from this that the two soldiers would supply the information just now denied him by Provaznyik, he replied by asking them a question (‘What I want to know is, is he alive?’), then launched into his prepared speech of complicated explanations in defence of Valuska, but didn’t get very far. They quickly let him know that he should stop right now, as, in the first place, they were the ones asking the questions round here, and, in the second place, they were not interested in ‘angelic beings, postmen’s cloaks or pots’, and if he meant to divert the attention of the authorities he was not helping himself ‘by rambling on like this’, all they wanted to know was Valuska’s whereabouts, where he was, but Eszter, misunderstanding them, replied that they could rest assured, there was no better place for the person they were seeking than his own house, at which point they lost patience, looked at each other furiously, and Eszter could see he was not likely to find an answer here either. They might note, he assured them, that his own position more or less accorded with theirs; he too thought that one had to take the greatest pains to ensure that any decision made was one that served the interests of people at large, they could certainly count on him there, but they should also understand that in order to be able to help them he should be told the truth about Valuska, and, since he could see that they were not going to say anything about this matter of such central importance to him (although it was their duty to do so) they should not be surprised that, until he received a direct answer to his question, he was not going to answer any more of theirs. The soldiers did not respond to this, they just looked at each other, then one of them nodded and said, ‘Right then, I’ll stay here,’ and his companion seized Eszter by the arm with no more than a, ‘Let’s go, old man!’ and, pushing him ahead, led him through the wall of staring faces. Eszter made no protest as he thought that this sudden turn of events meant they had bowed to his demands and accepted his ultimatum, and since his rough treatment did not change the nub of the matter he didn’t mind that it resembled the treatment meted out to prisoners; so they went some thirty or forty yards until the soldier shouted at him to turn left and he was obliged to leave Karácsony Street and head in the direction of the canal, and though he had no idea where they were going, he was happy to obey the command in the belief that wherever it was, at least ‘all would be revealed’ once they got there. They carried on marching and he had only just decided not to pursue the matter further for the time being, when, having reached the canal bank, he couldn’t resist trying again (‘At least let me know if he is alive …?!’) but his escort cut him so rudely short he realized it would be better if he postponed his enquiries and continued in silence, until he was commanded to cross the canal by the Iron Bridge then turn down a short passageway, when he suspected that their destination must, provisionally at least, be the High Street. Where to from there, he couldn’t begin to guess, since any public building would do as a prison or charnel house in an emergency, and this train of fruitless speculation only resulted in the previous image of horror returning to torture him, only this time the situation was not the foot of some wall ‘amongst the rubble’ but in a temporary mortuary. As he had suspected, they emerged in the High Street, at which point he decided to stop guessing and concentrate his strength on banishing such images and ordering the thoughts that whirled about them: he would go over his impressions, examine them closely, and decide what was fact and what was mere shadowy premonition, he would weigh every word, each look, every apparently insignificant detail, in case something had missed his careful scrutiny, anything that might countervail his sense of doom, in case there was something in what Mrs Harrer, Dr Provaznyik and the soldiers had said which might suggest that Valuska was simply a prisoner and that he was sitting somewhere, frightened, uncomprehending but unharmed, waiting to be set free. But whichever way he looked at it, the hope of getting his friend back in one piece lacked a little substance, for apart from Mrs Harrer’s account there was nothing else to support it, and he was soon forced to admit that the words and details he conjured either cast him into the deepest doubt or—and here the corpse in the street came to mind—swept away any hope whatsoever, and, by the time they had rounded the Water Board office and turned down Town Hall Street, he was already wishing he had not undertaken the risky venture of ‘ordering his thoughts’, for, however he tried to avoid it, he kept coming up against the image of the corpse, which seemed to have taken on an extraordinarily personal significance. He had to identify the corpse time and time again, he had to confront the fact that while in Karácsony Street—apart from the shameful sense of relief and the sheer horror of looking on death—the knowledge of the person of the victim had led his thoughts into a far from reassuring direction: it weighed on him and frightened him, since the murderous attack, or so it seemed to him, was not directed at any random target, not at all, indeed it suggested what they might find, what he had to prepare himself for, once they had reached their destination. The ruthless act that killed that woman was rather too close to Valuska for comfort, and even if he couldn’t quite follow the reasons behind it, he felt that the fate of one must prefigure the fate of the other; he could no longer ignore the fact that the head that lolled over the edge of the pavement belonged to Mrs Plauf, and this meant that nothing could prevent him projecting the boy’s image on to the stiff, brutally executed body of his mother. He couldn’t explain to himself what the woman might have been doing here in the middle of the night, particularly this woman, Mrs Plauf, who, no doubt, unlike he himself, would have been aware of what was going on, a woman who, he was sure even though he did not know her well, would, like all other women in town, have been most reluctant to leave her house after dark; he couldn’t understand this, nor, given the other possibility that they had broken in on her, why they should have dragged her out, it was all too strange, too mysterious why the connection between mother and son should be made so self-evident. There was nothing to justify his confidence in this but there was no question in his mind of having to justify it, as his instinct had told him so, and he was wholly captive to his instincts though he had tried in vain to pretend it was not so; he knew that the attempt to free himself from the uncertainty that tortured him had been entirely successful and that the weighing up of chances led only to the annihilation of any chance whatsoever. He no longer believed in a favourable outcome and he did not comfort himself, as they walked the last few steps, with the thought that any such consolation was to be had: he utterly resigned himself to whatever might happen and resisted any hysterical hope of resolution, and when the soldier barked at him (‘Right!’) he turned to command and entered the doors of the town hall like a tame and broken man; then, at the foot of some stairs, another soldier joined them and they led him upstairs where he had to wait by a door, surrounded by a ring of locals, while his escort went in then quickly returned for him, so he might usher him into an enormous hall where he was told to sit on a chair by the entrance with four other people. His escort saluted and departed when the business was done, and Eszter obediently took his place on the chair designated for him, making no attempt to look around, hanging his head as if he had no strength left to raise it, as he was feeling as ill as he had done the previous afternoon—perhaps it was the contrast between the excessive warmth inside and the biting cold outside, or the humidity; perhaps, now that he was finally sitting down, it was simply his system protesting against the long walk which had tired him out. It took a good few minutes for this sense of weakness and dizziness to pass and for him to recover some of his strength, but once he had done so
it was a mere few seconds before he realized and understood that they hadn’t brought him where they were supposed to, that what waited for him was not what he had anticipated, that all his anxiety and speculation, all his hopes and despairs, had been superfluous, or at least over-hasty: this wasn’t a prison, nor a mortuary; he wasn’t going to get any answers only more questions, and in fact there was no point in talking any more or even in being here, since, looking round, Eszter could see that Valuska was nowhere to be seen, neither dead nor alive. Opposite him on the far side the enormous windows were covered with thick heavy curtains, and the great twilit hall with its high entrance seemed to be divided into two equal halves as if by an invisible line; the half where he was sitting by the wall was occupied by a man with a badly bruised face, somewhere in the middle, wearing a quilted jacket and rough boots; a step in front of him stood a young soldier, hands clasped behind his back (some kind of officer, as far as Eszter could tell), and behind them, in the corner, who else but his own wife, who clearly showed no interest in what was happening here and was intensely examining the other half of the hall, where there was little to be seen in the darkness, not at first glance anyway and even then only faintly, except a high-backed, ornately carved chair with its back to them, which, as far as he could remember, had served to support the dignity of every mayor since time began. Sitting immediately next to his left in the row of chairs was an astonishingly corpulent, almost preternaturally fat man, making whistling noises as he breathed as if he wanted to make the very air he was taking in that much heavier, who, taking occasional puffs of a scented cigar, would be shaken by a terrible fit of coughing now and then, when he would keep looking round for an ashtray that he couldn’t find, so that eventually he would have to drop his ash on the carpet. The other three to the right of him were constantly fidgeting in their anxiety and when Eszter recognized them and greeted them quietly they replied only with curt nods, then pretended not to be the people he had met yesterday in front of the White Collar Club of the stocking factory, who then could barely bring themselves to part from him: now they turned their heads to concentrate on Mrs Eszter and the officer at the further end of the dark hall, debating in occasional whispers who should be the first if and when, as Mr Volent remarked, ‘they succeed in breaking that shameless criminal’ and ‘the lieutenant’ finally let them speak. It wasn’t too hard working out what this often repeated phrase referred to because, even if his bitter certainty that Valuska’s fate had been decided had killed off any curiosity he had concerning matters in hand, his eyes too were fixed on the heavily roughed-up figure in the centre and the officer assigned to him who made no attempt to disguise his impatience, and it was clear at a glance that what annoyed his three acquaintances was indeed the ‘shamelessness’ of the man in the quilted jacket, for judging by this unshakeable ‘shamelessness’, the interrogation (it must have been an interrogation), which reminded him rather of a duel, seemed most unlikely to reach a speedy end. The ‘lieutenant’, who had been forced, on account of Eszter’s arrival, to make a temporary halt in the proceedings until Eszter settled down after his sick spell and had also fixed his eyes on them, said nothing, but leaned forward, his face twitching, his eyes flashing threateningly, staring into the eyes of the other as if, unable to proceed any other way, he trusted in this steely penetrative gaze not merely to force his opponent to yield but to annihilate him completely. But the man didn’t even flinch and stared back as if to say he would not be frightened by this, nor by anything else. If anything the look on his bruised face suggested a kind of implacable, mocking contempt for the officer, and when the officer felt he’d had enough of this and turned furiously away from him, the man responded only with the merest fleeting smile since it was clear that he had absolutely no interest in the polished insignia ranged across the officer’s chest, in the annihilating power of his ‘steely’ gaze, nor in what, in his frustration, he had resolved to do: that is to say in whether the officer could cope with him personally or whether (and judging by the state of his face, thought Eszter, it wouldn’t have been the first time he had chosen this alternative) he was sent to be dealt with by others who had so far failed to soften him up with any amount of beating, who might, after all, persuade him to confess by—here Volent’s voice drifted into Eszter’s consciousness—‘breaking the man’s dumb resistance’. The officer took a step back and finally burst out, bellowing at his prisoner (‘Why don’t you open your gob?!’), while the other spat at him, ‘I told you. Give me a loaded gun, empty the room and I’ll talk all right …’ then shrugged as if to say, ‘I’m not about to start bargaining with you,’ and that was all, but it was enough to suggest what had been happening before Eszter arrived, the aim of the duel being to get the man in the quilted jacket to speak and reveal what it was everyone by the wall, even though they were themselves dying to speak, was longing to hear. There was something they wanted to know about the night’s events from this man, who was probably chosen entirely at the whim of the soldiers from among the ‘filthy rabble’ in the market square; they wanted details, they wanted precisely what the lieutenant himself, after his affirmative answer to the condition proposed (‘Then drop dead all by yourself’), demanded—‘facts, circumstances, precise details’—so that, all this being given, they might be able to put together a picture of events that was thoroughgoing, universally applicable and generally reassuring for everyone, soldiers and citizens alike. Eszter, on the other hand, wanted to know nothing of this, or indeed of anything, since he was convinced that all such ‘facts, circumstances and details’, however good, could, in the worst eventuality, do nothing more than skirt around the question of Valuska and certainly would not lead to him, so he would just as soon have blocked his ears when the two parties, having decided to satisfy the conditions of the proposal, started a tense but fast question and answer session in which the officer snapped out the questions and the prisoner replied with deliberately provocative, impertinent and inhumanly cold answers, a dialogue that after the long silence that preceded it, appeared remarkably slick and polished.