eeks ‘absolutely blazed’. She was delighted to observe that the helpless fury of her hostess (‘She’s frightened of me!’ she decided with some satisfaction) was slowly overcoming her earlier indignation, and so, glancing round the room stuffed with plants which made her feel she was in some meadow or yard full of loose clods of grass, she switched back to her low murmur — for no other reason now than to amuse herself — to remark by way of acknowledgement: ‘Well, that’s how it is. It’s every townee’s desire to bring nature indoors. We all feel like that, Piri, love.’ But Mrs Plauf did not answer, she did the least she was constrained to do and simply gave a little nod of her head, which was a signal clear enough for Mrs Eszter to comprehend that she should get on to her business. Of course, whether Mrs Plauf did or did not agree to play her part in the matter — since she couldn’t have guessed that she had already said ‘yes’ by failing to prevent the invasion of her flat, the sheer presence of her visitor being the whole point — her willingness or otherwise was of little importance; nevertheless, having painstakingly described the situation for her (in the manner of ‘don’t for a moment think, my dear, it is I who want him, no, it’s the town that wants Eszter, but to persuade a man as busy as everyone knows he is to act is so hard only your nice gentle son can do it …’), and having addressed her in the friendliest manner possible while looking directly into her eyes, she was undeniably and unpleasantly surprised by the immediate rejection, because she could see perfectly well it wasn’t that relations between Valuska and Mrs Plauf ‘had totally broken down some years ago’, and that it was Mrs Plauf’s ‘parental duty to distance herself from anything to do with Valuska, though one could well imagine what pain and bitterness one suffered having to say this of one’s own son who did not lack a heart but was distinctly ungrateful and useless’, but that all her suppressed fury at her feeble helplessness had been concentrated into this ‘no’ which would serve to pay Mrs Eszter back for the indignity of the last few minutes, for the fact she was small and weak while Mrs Eszter was large and powerful, that, however she would have liked to deny it, she had been forced to admit that it was her son who was ‘a lodger at Hagelmayer’s’, her son who was a village idiot whose abilities barely qualified him to be newsboy for the local post office — and that she had to own up to all this before a stranger disapproved of by all her friends. There was enough evidence for her to have grasped this anyway, and seeing that Mrs Plauf, ‘this midget’, was quite impotent before her, as if only by way of recompense for the fact she had been forced to sit for almost twenty minutes and endure ‘that infuriating smile’ and those mock-pious looks of hers, she leapt from the deep apple-green armchair with a contemptuous aside to the effect that she must be going, cut her way through the thick foliage, accidentally brushing a tiny sampler from the wall with her shoulder, and, without another word, stubbed her cigarette out in a never-before-used ashtray and snatched down her enormous black fake-fur coat. For while she was perfectly capable of coolly appraising a situation, knowing she could no longer be surprised by anything, once anyone dared say no to her, as Mrs Plauf did just now, her gorge immediately rose and she practically burst with gall, for she had no clear idea what to do in the circumstances. The fury simmered in her, the anger consumed her, so much so that when the neurotically hand-wringing Mrs Plauf addressed a question to her just as she was snapping the last steel clip of her coat into place (her eyes flashing, her lips tight, neck craned back, staring at the ceiling), something to the effect that she was ‘terribly anxious’ (‘… This evening … when I got back from my sisters’ house … and … I hardly recognized the town … Has anybody explained why the streetlamps are no longer lit? … This sort of thing never used to happen before’), she practically screamed at the terrified housewife: ‘You have every cause for anxiety. We are on the threshold of a more searching, more honest, more open society. There are new times just around the corner, my dear Piri.’ At these significant words, and more particularly because Mrs Eszter emphasized the last sentence by jabbing an admonitory finger in the air, the colour quite drained from Mrs Plauf’s face; but none of this rendered her any kind of satisfaction, because, however pleasant it was to see this and to know that the little ‘bag of tits’ would persist in hoping for one word, for one reassuring answer from her unintentionally provoked visitor all the way down the stairs, right until she had closed the gate behind her, and however clearly she realized that she should have accepted this as recompense, the wound to her self-esteem administered by Mrs Plauf, this ‘no’, like a poisoned arrow stuck in a tree, continued to quiver for an unaccountable length of time and she was forced shamefully to admit that what should have been merely an unpleasant sting (for she had after all convincingly accomplished her goal and this tiny setback was of little importance) was slowly intensifying to an ever more acute pain. If Mrs Plauf had agreed enthusiastically, as one had every right to expect she would, she would have remained an easily manipulated tool, unaware of the clash of events above her, events which, in any case, were of no account to her, and her insignificant role in them would, quite properly, have come to an end, but no (‘But no!’), with this rejection her superfluous being was now elevated to the role of what amounted to anonymous partner; this dwarfish nonentity (dwarfish, that is to say, compared with Mrs Eszter’s unquestionably intenser reality) had, so to speak, dragged her down to her own safely ignorable level, so that she might revenge herself on her visitor’s radiant air of superiority, which she could neither tolerate nor resist. And while of course this helpless sense of injury could not last for ever, it wouldn’t have been proper to claim, after all this, that she was quite simply over ‘the business’, nor did she claim it when later — at home by that time — she recounted the meeting to her friend, though she did perhaps skate over certain details, and remarked only on how ‘the wonderful, breathtakingly fresh air’, which revived her immediately she set foot outside Mrs Plauf’s stifling stairwell, had had ‘the most beneficial effect’ on her judgement, so that by the time she had reached Nadabán’s butcher’s shop, she had recovered her earlier equanimity, was once again decisive, invulnerable, absolutely calm and full of confidence. And this — the decisive effect of sixteen degrees of frost on her frayed nerves — was certainly no exaggeration, for Mrs Eszter genuinely belonged to that class of people who ‘sicken with spring and collapse in summer’, for whom enervating warmth, incapacitating heat and the sun blazing in the sky were a source of terror, confining her to bed with the most shocking migraine and a strong tendency to bleed; one of that class, in other words, for whom cold, not the glowing fireplace, is the natural medium that offers protection from unremitting Evil, those who seem practically resurrected once terminal frost sets in and polar winds sweep round corners, for it is only winter that can clear their vision, cool their ungovernable passions and reorganize that mass of loose thought dissolved in summer sweats; and so it was along Baron Béla Wenckheim Avenue, leaning into the icy wind that frightens weaker ordinary people with its hard early frosts, that she felt cured and properly prepared to assess her new burden so that she could rise above Mrs Plauf’s hurtful attitude. Because there was much to rise above and aspire to and much to look at: so, while the cold penetrated and refreshed every atom of her body, she propelled the vast weight of her importance along the unremittingly straight pavement with ever greater abandon, as if she were as light as a sparrow, and decided to her satisfaction that the irreversible process of ruin, schism and disintegration would continue according to its own infrangible rules, and that, day by day, the range of ‘whatever things’ were still capable of functioning or showing vigour was growing narrower; the way she saw it the very houses were dying by imperceptible degrees of neglect, obedient to the fate that was certain to overtake them: the bond between lodger and lodging was broken; stucco was dropping in great chunks, rotten window-frames had separated from walls and, on either side of the street, roof after roof showed signs of sagging, as if deliberately to demonstrate that something in the constitution of beams and rafters — and not just beams and rafters but stones, bones and earth itself — was in the process of losing cohesion; along the pavements the rubbish that no one felt like collecting and no one did collect was spreading ever more luxuriantly across the whole town, and the cats that haunted loose mounds of it, cats whose numbers seemed to have increased at an impossible rate and who more or less took over the streets at night, had grown so confident that when Mrs Eszter wanted to cut through a thick forest of them they hardly deigned to move out of even her way, and when they did it was slowly, insolently, at the last possible moment. She saw all this as she saw the rusty shutters on shops not opened for weeks, the drooping arms of unlit ornamental lampposts, the cars and buses abandoned on the street for lack of fuel … and suddenly a delightful tickling sensation ran all down her spine because this slow decay had, for her, long ceased to signify some terminal disillusion but was instead a harbinger of what would soon replace a world as ripe for ruin as this; not an end then but a beginning, something that would be founded ‘not on sickly lies but on the harsh merciless truth’, something that would place supreme emphasis on ‘fitness of body and a powerful and beautiful desire for the intoxicating realm of action’. Mistress of the future, she already had courage enough to look the town full in the eye, perfectly convinced that she was standing on the threshold of ‘sweeping changes leading to something new, something of infinite promise’, and it wasn’t only the usual every-day signs of collapse that confirmed her view, but a good many ordinary yet strange and, in their own way, not altogether unwelcome occurrences which hastened to prove that the unavoidable resurrection, despite the lack of ‘normal human resolve to enter the fray’, had been ordained by the mysterious and overwhelming forces of heaven itself. The day before yesterday the enormous water-tower at the back of the Göndölcs Gardens had begun — and continued for some minutes — to sway dangerously above the tiny houses surrounding it, a phenomenon which, in the opinion of the physics and math master of the local grammar school, a trustworthy member of the astronomical observation group whose telescope was positioned on top of the tower and who had interrupted many hours of solitary chess to run down breathless with excitement to proclaim the news, was ‘quite inexplicable’. Yesterday, the clock of the Catholic church in the main square, immobile for decades, startled everyone by beginning to strike (a sound which shot like electricity through Mrs Eszter!), a fact all the more extraordinary when you considered that of the four rusted parts of the mechanism, three, from which even the hands had been removed, leapt into simultaneous action, and continued, with ever shorter intervals between their dull ticking, to beat out passing time. It was no wonder then that, having ever since nightfall expected to come upon some other ‘ominous sign’, she was not surprised at what she saw when, arriving by the Hotel Komló at the corner of Hétvezér Square, she glanced up at the gigantic poplar which used to stand there. This colossus, over sixty feet high, a constant reminder of the great floods of the nearby River Körös, a wonderful shelter for hordes of sparrows and a monument which for generations had been the marvel of the town, was lying, lifeless, against the hotel’s Hétvezér Square façade, straddled across the entire extent of the square, prevented from collapsing into the alley between only by thick branches entangled in the half-collapsed guttering; it wasn’t that the trunk had been snapped in two by some violent gust, nor that it had been eaten away by worms and years of acid rain: the whole thing, roots and all, had split the hard concrete of the road. It was only to be expected that one day this ancient of days should eventually collapse, but that it should happen