pálinka then picked up his journal and tried to capture in words all he had just suffered. He stared at the paper then wrote: “An unforgivable error. I took a common bell for the Great Bells of Heaven. A filthy tramp! A madman on the run from the asylum. I’m an idiot!” He covered himself with his blankets, leaned back in the chair, and looked out over the field. The rain was quietly pattering. His composure was back now. He went over the events of the erly afternoon, over his “moment of enlightenment” then pulled out the notebook headed MRS. HALICS. He opened it on the page where the notes ended and started writing. “She is sitting in the kitchen. The Bible is in front of her and she is quietly muttering some text. She looks up. She is hugry. She goes to the pantry and returns with bacon, sausage and bread. She starts to chomp her way through the meat and takes a bite of the bread. Occasionally she turns the pages of the Bible.” Writing this down had a calming effect, but, when he leafed back to what he had written earlier about SCHMIDT, KRÁNER and MRS. HALICS, he was disappointed to note that it was all wrong. He stood up and started walking about his room, stopping now and then to think, then moving again. He looked round the narrow limits of his home and his attention was caught by the door. “Damn it!” he groaned. He took a box of nails from under the wardrobe and, with a few nails in one hand and the hammer in the other, went over to the door and started beating in the nails with increasing fury. Having finished, he calmly returned to his chair, covered his back with the blankets, and mixed another drink, this time, after some consideration, in half-half proportion. He gazed and thought, then suddenly his eyes brightened and he took out a new notebook. “It was raining when. .,” he wrote, then shook his head and crossed it out. “It was raining when Futaki awoke, and. .,” he tried again, but decided this too was “poor stuff.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose, adjusted his glasses then propped his elbows on the table and put his head in his hands. He saw before him, as clear as if by magic, the path prepared for him, the way the fog swam up from either side of it and, in the middle of the narrow path, the luminous face of his future, its lineaments bearing the infernal marks of drowning. He reached for the pencil again and felt he was back on track now: there were enough notebooks, enough pálinka, his medication would last till spring at least and, unless the nails rotted in the door, no one would disturb him. Careful not to damage the paper, he started writing. “One morning near the end of October not long before the first drops of the mercilessly long autumn rains began to fall on the cracked and saline soil on the western side of the estate (later the stinking yellow sea of mud would render footpaths impassable and put the town too beyond reach) Futaki woke to hear bells. The closest possible source was a lonely chapel about four kilometers southwest on the old Hochmeiss estate but not only did that have no bell but the tower had collapsed during the war and it was too far to hear anything at that distance. And in any case they did not sound distant to him, these ringing-booming bells; their triumphal clangor was swept along by the wind and seemed to come from somewhere close by (‘It’s as if they were coming from the mill. . ’). He propped himself on his elbows on the pillow so as to look out of the mouse-hole-sized kitchen window that was partly misted up, and directed his gaze to the faint blue dawn sky but the field was still and silent, bathed only in the, now ever fainter, bell sound, and the only light to be seen was the one glimmering in the doctor’s window whose house was set well apart from the others on the far side, and that was only because its occupant had for years been unable to sleep in the dark. Futaki held his breath because he wanted to know where the noise came from: he couldn’t afford to lose a single stray note of the rapidly fading clangor, however remote (‘You must be asleep, Futaki. . ’). Despite his lameness he was well known for his light tread and he hobbled across the ice-cold stone floor of the kitchen, soundless as a cat, opened the widows and leaned out (‘Is no one awake? Can’t people hear it? Is nobody else around?’). A sharp damp gust hit him straight in the face so he had to close his eyes for a moment and, apart from the cockcrow, a distant bark, and the fierce howling of the wind that had sprung up just a few minutes earlier there was nothing to hear however hard he listened but the dull beating of his own heart, as if the whole thing had been merely a kind of game or ghostly half-dream (“. . It’s as if somebody out there wants to scare me’). He gazed sadly at the threatening sky, at the burned-out remnants of a locust-plagued summer, and suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia, as in a vision, the progress of spring, summer, fall and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude in the much greater spaces of eternity, a brilliant conjuring trick to produce something apparently orderly out of chaos, to establish a vantage point from which chance might begin to look like necessity. . and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin, painfully trying to tear his body from it, only, eventually, to deliver himself — utterly naked, without identifying mark, stripped down to essentials — into the care of the people whose duty it was to wash the corpses, people obeying a order snapped out in the dry air against a background loud with torturers and flayers of skin, where he was obliged to regard the human condition without a trace of pity, without a single possibility of any way back to life, because by then he would know for certain that all his life he had been playing with cheaters who had had marked the cards and who would, in the end, strip him even of his last means of defense, of that hope of some day finding his way back home. He turned his head towards the east, once the home of a thriving industry, now nothing but a set of dilapidated and deserted buildings, watching while the first rays of a swollen red sun broke through the topmost beams of a derelict farmhouse from which the roof tiles had been stripped. “I really should come to a decision. I can’t stay here any longer.” He drew the warm duvet over him again and rested his head on his arm, but could not close his eyes; at first it had been the ghostly bells that had frightened him but now it was the threatening silence that followed: anything might happen now, he felt. But he did not move a muscle, not until the objects around him, that had so far been merely listening, started up a nervous conversation (the sideboard gave a creak, a saucepan rattled, a china plate slid back into the rack) at which point. .”