knew, was deadly certain, that from then on this was how it would be. He realized that all those years of arduous, painstaking work had finally borne fruit: he had finally become the master of a singular art that enabled him not only to describe a world whose eternal unremitting progress in one direction required such mastery but also — to a certain extent — he could even intervene in the mechanism behind an apparently chaotic swirl of events!. . He rose from his observation post and, eyes burning, started to walk up and down from one corner of the narrow room to the other. He tried to keep control of himself but without success: the realization had come so unexpectedly, he was so unprepared for it, so much so that in those first few moments he even wondered if he had lost his mind. . “Could it be? Am I going mad?” It took him a long time to calm down: his throat was dry, his heart was beating wildly and he was pouring with sweat. There was a moment he thought he’d simply burst, that he couldn’t bear the weight of this responsibility; his enormous, obese body seemed to be running away with him. Out of breath, panting hard, he slumped back in his chair. There was so much to consider all at once all he could do was sit in the cold sharp light, his brain positively hurting with the confusion inside him. . He carefully grasped the pencil, pulled out the SCHMIDT file from among the rest, opened it on the appropriate page, and uncertainly, like a man with good reason to fear the serious consequences of his actions, wrote the following sentence: “He is sitting with his back to the window, his body casting a pale shadow on the floor.” He gave a great gulp, put down the pencil and, with trembling hands, mixed himself another pálinka, spilled half of it and downed the rest. “He has a red saucepan in his lap, containing spuds in paprika. He isn’t eating. He isn’t hungry. He needs a piss so stands up, skirts the kitchen table, goes out to the yard and through the back door. He comes back. Sits down. Mrs. Schmidt asks him something? He doesn’t answer. Using his feet, he pushes away the saucepan he had put down on the floor. He’s not hungry.” The doctor’s hands were still trembling as he lit a cigarette. He wiped his perspiring brow then made airplane motions with his arms to let his armpits breathe. He adjusts the blankets across his shoulders and leaned over the journal again. “Either I’ve gone mad or, by God’s mercy, this morning I have discovered that I am the wielder of mesmerizing power. I find I can control the flow of events around me using nothing more than words. Not that I have the least idea yet what to do. Or I have gone mad. .” He lost confidence at this point. “It’s all in my imagination,” he grumbled to himself, then tried another experiment. He pulled out the notebook headed KRÁNER. He found the last entry and feverishly began to write again. “He is lying on his bed, fully clothed. His boots hang off the end of the bed because he doesn’t want to muddy the bedding. It’s stifling hot in the room. Out in the kitchen Mrs. Kráner is clattering dishes. Kráner calls her through the open door. Mrs. Kráner says something. Kráner angrily turns his back to the door and buries his head in the pillow. He is trying to sleep and closes his eyes. He is asleep.” The doctor gave a nervous sigh, mixed another drink, and anxiously looked round the room. Scared, touched by an occasional doubt, he once again resolved: “There can be no doubt about the fact that by focused conceptualizing I can, to some degree, decide what should happen on the estate. Because only that which has been conceptualized can happen. It’s just that, at this stage, of course, it is an utter mystery to me what I should make happen, because. .” At that moment the “bells” began to ring again. He only had time enough to decide he had not misheard last evening, he really did hear “sounds’, but he had no opportunity to consider where the clanging noises were coming from because no sooner had they reached him they were were absorbed in the permanent hum of silence and once the last bell died away he felt such emptiness in his soul he felt he had lost something of deep value. What he thought he heard in these curious distant sounds was “the lost melody of hope’, a kind of objectless encouragement, the perfectly incomprehensible words of a vital message, of which the only part he understood was that “it means something good, and offers some direction to my, as yet unresolved, power.”. . He put an end to his feverish jottings, quickly put his coat on and stuffed cigarettes and matches into his pocket because he now felt it more important than ever to seek out, or at least try to seek out, the source of that distant ringing. The fresh air dizzied him at first: he rubbed his burning eyes, then — not to rouse the least attention of the neighbors at their windows — left by the gate leading to the back garden and, as far as possible, tried to hurry. Reaching the mill, he stopped dead for a moment because he had no idea whether he was heading in the right direction. He stepped through the enormous gates of the mill and heard yelping sounds from one of the upper stories. “The Horgos girls.” He turned and left. He looked round not knowing where to go and what to do. Should he skirt the estate and set out toward the Szikes?. . Or should he go by the metalled road that led to the bar. Or maybe it was worth trying the road to Almássy Manor? Maybe he should just stay here in front of the mill in case “the bells” started again He lit a cigarette, cleared his throat, and because he really couldn’t make up his mind one way or the other he nervously stamped his feet. He looked at the enormous acacias that surrounded the mill, shivered in the sharp wind, and wondered if it wasn’t a stupid idea going out just like that, on the spur of the moment, whether he hadn’t acted too precipitately, since, after all, a whole night had separated the two peals of bells. So why should expect another so soon. . He was about to turn around and go home where there were warm blankets waiting for him until the next time, when, just at that moment, “the bells” started ringing again. He hurried over to the open space in front of the mill and by doing so managed to solve one mystery: “the bell sounds” seemed to be coming from the other side of the metalled road (‘It could be the Hochmeiss estate!. . ’) and it wasn’t simply that he could now work out the direction but that he was now convinced the bells represented a call to action, or at least an encouragement, a promise; that they were not merely the products of a sick imagination, or a delusion produced by a sudden rush of emotion. . Enthusiastically, he set out for the metalled road, crossed it and, taking no notice of mud or puddles, made his way toward the Hochmeiss estate, his heart “buzzing with hope, expectation and confidence. . He felt “the bells” were compensation for the miseries of his entire life, for all fate had inflicted on him, that they were a fitting reward for stubborn survival. . Once he succeeded in fully understanding the bells, everything would go welclass="underline" with this power in his hands he would be able to lend a new, as yet unknown momentum “to human affairs.” And so he felt an almost childish joy when, at the far end of the Hochmeiss estate, he glimpsed the little ruined chapel, and while he didn’t know whether the chapel — it had been destroyed in the last war and had never shown the least sign of life since then — contained a “bell’, or indeed anything else, he didn’t think it beyond imagination that it might. . After all no one had been down this way for years, except perhaps some simple-minded tramp needing shelter for the night. . He stopped by the main door of the chapel and tried to open it but however he wrenched and struggled, using his whole body weight, it wouldn’t budge, so he skirted the building, found a small rotted side door in the crumbling wall, gave it a little push and it creaked open. He ducked and stepped in: cobwebs, dust, dirt, stench and darkness. There wasn’t much left of the pews, only a few broken pieces, which was more than could be said of the altar which lay shattered everywhere. Weeds were growing over the gaps in the brickwork. Thinking he heard a hoarse gasping from the corner by the front door, he twisted around, moved closer and found himself confronting a huddled figure, an infinitely aged, tiny, wrinkled creature lying on the ground, his knees to his chin, shaking with fear. Even in the dark he could see the light of his terrified eyes. Once the creature saw he’d been discovered he moaned in despair and scrambled over to the far corner to escape. “Who are you?” the doctor asked in a firm voice, having overcome his momentary fright. The shrunken figure didn’t answer, but drew further back into his corner, ready to spring. “Do you understand what I’m asking?!” the doctor demanded, a little louder. “Who the hell are you?!” The creature muttered something incomprehensible, raised his hands in front of him by way of defense, then burst into tears. The doctor grew angry. “What are you doing here? Are you a tramp?” When the homunculus failed to answer and just continued whimpering, the doctor lost his temper. “Is there a bell here?” he shouted. The tiny old man leapt to his feet in fright, instantly stopped crying, and waved his arms about. “El!. . el!” he piped and waved to the doctor to follow him. He opened a tiny door in a niche beside the main portal and pointed upward. “El!. . el!” “Good God,” muttered the doctor. “A lunatic! Where have you escaped from, you halfwit!” The creature went on up the stairs leaving the doctor a few steps further back, trying to climb up by the wall in case the rotted, dangerously creaking stairs collapsed beneath him. When they reached the small belltower of which only one brick wall remained, the rest having been brought down ages ago either by the wind or a bomb, the doctor immediately woke as if from “hours of a sickly, nonsensical trance.” A quite small bell was hanging in the middle of the exposed, improvised structure, suspended from a beam, one end of which was propped on top of the brick wall, the other on top of the newel post. “How did you manage to raise the beam?” the doctor asked. The old man stared hard at him a moment than stepped over to the bell. “Uh — ur — ah — co-i! Uh — ur — ah — co-i!” he screeched, grabbed an iron bar and started ringing the bell in terror. The doctor had gone pale and was leaning against the wall of the stairs for support. He shouted at the man who was still feverishly striking the bells “Stop it! Stop it at once!” But this only made things worse. “Uh — urk — ah — co-i! Uh — urk — ah — co-i! Uh — urk — ah — o-i!” he kept screaming, hitting the bell ever harder. “The Turks are coming?! Coming up your mother’s ass, you fool!” the doctor yelled back, then gathering up his strength, climbed down the tower, hurried from the chapel, and tried to put as much distance between himself and the madman — anything not to hear the terrifying screech that seemed to follow him like a cracked trumpet all the way back to the metalled road. It was growing towards dusk by the time he got home and he assumed his position by the window again. It took some time, several minutes in fact, to regain his composure, for his hands to stop trembling enough for him to be able to lift the demijohn, mix himself a drink and light a cigarette. He downed the