now, that the roots should release their hold at this precise moment, held a peculiar significance for Mrs Eszter. She stared at the ghastly apparition, at the tree lying diagonally across the dark square, then, with the knowing smile of one initiated into such things, remarked: ‘Of course. How could it be otherwise?’ and with this secret smile playing about her lips continued on her way in the secret knowledge that the sequence of ‘miracles’ and ‘omens’ was far from over. And she was not wrong. A mere few steps later, her eye, hungry now for more strange phenomena, lit on a small group of people silently loitering down Liget Street, whose presence here at this hour — for it was an act of courage to venture out of doors after dark in a town currently bereft of streetlighting — was wholly inexplicable. As to who they might be and what they wanted here at this time, she couldn’t begin to imagine, and truth to tell she wasn’t particularly bothered to try, for she immediately read this, along with the water-tower, the church clock and the state of the poplar tree, as simply another harbinger of the resurrection from ruins that was sure to follow; however, when, at the end of the boulevard, she entered the arena of Kossuth Square’s bare acacias and discovered group upon group of silently waiting people, a hot flush ran straight through her, since it suddenly occurred to her that it was not wholly impossible that after many long months (‘Years! Years! …’), after all her enduring and certain faith (‘Perhaps! …), the decisive moment when preparation would give way to action might actually have come and ‘the prophecy be fulfilled’. As far as she could see from this side of the square, roughly fifty to sixty men in twos or threes stood on the icy flat-trodden grass of the market-place: their feet shod in waterproof boots or heavy brogues, wearing caps with ear-flaps or greasy peasant hats on their heads and, here and there, hands clutching cigarettes that glowed into sudden life. Even under these conditions, in the darkness, it wasn’t hard to see that they were all outsiders, and the fact that fifty or sixty strangers should stand about in numbing cold at such a late hour of the evening was in itself more than surprising. Their dumb immobility seemed all the more peculiar and more spellbinding to Mrs Eszter, for it was like glimpsing the angels of the apocalypse in mufti at the end of the street. Though she should have crossed the square diagonally, cutting through by the most direct route to her flat in Honvéd Passage, just off the square, she felt a twinge — only a twinge, mind — of fear, and skirted their irregular ranks by pursuing an L shape round them, holding her breath and flitting like a shadow, till she reached the far side. Having arrived at the corner of Honvéd Passage and glancing back one last time, she was, if not exactly flabbergasted, certainly deeply disappointed to discover the enormous form of the circus vehicle, a circus whose arrival had been well advertised (though without a fixed date), for it was clear to her in a moment that the crowd behind her were not so much ‘the disguised heralds of the new age’ as, in all likelihood, ‘ragged ticket touts for the circus’, who, in their boundless avarice, were capable of suffering the whole night in the cold so that they could make a bit of money by buying up all the tickets in the morning once the booking office was open. Her disappointment was all the more bitter because, quite apart from the rude awakening it provided from her feverish reverie, it diminished the proud pleasure she had personally taken in the hiring and arrival of the by-now notorious company: the result of her first significant public victory a week ago when — with the decisive support of the police chief — she managed to crush the resistance of the more cowardly members of the town’s executive committee who, by referring to the fact that all reports from outlying villages and hamlets, not to mention unsubstantiated gossip, suggested that the weird troupe caused alarm and unrest wherever it appeared, and that, furthermore, there had been one or two ugly incidents, had wished to ban it altogether from the town’s precincts. Yes: it had been her first significant triumph (there were many who said that her speech about ‘the inalienable rights of common curiosity’ could easily have been printed in the papers), yet, despite this, she could not enjoy the fruits of victory, since it was precisely because of the circus that she discovered, too late, the laughably false nature of her misapprehension concerning the true identity of these loiterers about her. Since she felt the mordancy of ridicule more keenly than she did the attraction and mystery of the enormous wagon, she didn’t even bother to investigate it in order to satisfy her own ‘inalienable rights of common curiosity’ about a vehicle so exotic it fully lived up to its publicity, but with a withering glance of contempt turned her back on both ‘the stinking juggernaut and those impudent rogues’, and strode with clanging steps down the narrow pavement home. This fit of temper, needless to say — just like the one which followed her encounter with Mrs Plauf — consisted, as the idiom has it, more of smoke than of fire, and by the time she had reached the end of Honvéd Passage and slammed the frail gate of the garden behind her, she had succeeded in getting over her disappointment, for she had only to remind herself that by the end of the next day she would no longer be subject to her fate but the genuine master of it, and immediately she could breathe more easily and begin to feel the full import of her self once again, a self that chose decisively to dismiss any thought of premature daydreaming, since ‘it desired victory and was resolute in the pursuit of it’. The landlady, an old wine merchant, occupied the front block; she inhabited the rear building of the ramshackle peasant dwelling, and while the place could have done with some repair she was not dissatisfied with it; for though the low ceiling prevented her standing up as straight as she might have wished and undoubtedly made movement difficult, and while the tiny ill-fitting windows and the walls crumbling with damp left scope for improvement, Mrs Eszter was so far a disciple of the so-called simple life that she hardly noticed these insignificant details, since, according to her convictions, if there was a bed, a wardrobe, a lamp and a basin, and if the roof didn’t leak in ‘the living unit’, all possible human needs were satisfied. And so, apart from a vast sprung iron bedstead, a single wardrobe, a stool with basin and jug, and a crested chandelier (she tolerated neither carpet, nor mirror, nor curtains), there was only an unvarnished table and a chair that had lost its back to serve for meals, a fold-away music-stand for the increasing amounts of official paper-work she had to bring home, and a coat-stand for guests (should there be any) to hang their coats on. As concerned the latter of course, ever since she had met the chief of police, she received no one except him, and he came every evening, for, from the day when the leather belt and shoulder strap, the polished boots and the revolver hanging at his side had swept her off her feet, she regarded him not only as a close friend, a man fit to support a solitary woman, but as an intimate confederate to whom she could trust her deepest most dangerous secrets, and pour out her heart in moments of weakness. At the same time — apart from all the basic conditions — it was not a trouble-free relationship, for the police chief, who was in any case prone to morose silences punctuated by the odd sudden fit of temper, was preoccupied by his ‘tragic family circumstances’—a wife who died in the flower of her youth and two little boys left to cope without a mother’s affections — and was a slave to drink, and, on being repeatedly questioned about it, would often admit that the only true remedy for his bitterness lay in the feminine warmth exuded by Mrs Eszter, which, to this day, was a burden she could never escape from. To this very day indeed, for Mrs Eszter — who had expected him to have arrived well before her — feared that the chief was at this very moment sitting in one of those suburban bars in his customary state of tortured gloom, so when she heard footsteps outside she went straight to the kitchen table, immediately reaching for the vinegar and box of bicarbonate, knowing from previous experience that the only cure for his condition was that (unfortunately) highly popular local mixture known as ‘goose-spritzer’, which, in the face of general opinion, she believed to be the only efficacious — if emetic — treatment, not only for indigestion the day after, but for drunkenness on the day. To her surprise the visitor turned out to be not the chief but Harrer, Valuska’s landlord, a stonemason who, probably because of his pockmarked face, was known to locals as ‘the vulture’; there he lay, flat out on the ground, because, as one could see at a glance, his legs, which were incapable of indefinitely supporting his constantly collapsing body, had given way just before his helplessly dangling hands could grasp the handle of the door. ‘What are you doing lying there?’ she barked at him, but Harrer didn’t move. He was a small, puny homunculus of a man; lying crumpled on the ground, his feeble legs folded under him, he would have fitted perfectly into one of those large dough-baskets stored out in the garden — furthermore he stank so intensely of cheap brandy that within a few minutes the fearful smell had filled the entire yard and penetrated every nook and cranny of the house, rousing even the old woman from her bed, who, as she drew the curtain of her courtyard window aside, could only wonder why ‘decent people can’t be content with drinking wine’. But by that time, Harrer, who seemed to have changed his mind, recovered consciousness and leapt from the doorway with such agility that Mrs Eszter almost thought the whole thing a joke. Nevertheless, it was immediately clear that it wasn’t, for waving his brandy bottle with one hand, the mason suddenly produced a tiny bouquet of flowers with the other, and, swaying in the most dangerous fashion, squinted at her in a manner so intensely beyond fooling, so utterly unreciprocated by Mrs Eszter — especially once she could make sense of his gulping and gasping to the effect that all he wanted was for Mrs Eszter to hug him as she once used to (for ‘you, your ladyship, and only you, can provide consolation for this poor sad heart of mine …!’) — that, grabbing him by the shoulder-pads of his coat, she raised him into the air and, sans quips or jokes, heaved him in the direction of the garden gate. The heavy coat landed like a half-empty sack some few yards off (for the sake of accuracy, right in front of the window of the old woman, who was still staring and wagging her head), and Harrer, while not quite certain whether this new fall was in any significant sense different from his earlier one, began to suspect he was not wanted and made to scamper away; leaving Mrs Eszter to return to her room, turn the key in the lock and try to put the affront out of her mind by switching on the pocket radio next to her bed. The pleasantly rousing tunes—‘jolly traditional airs’ as it happens — had, as always, a good effect on her, and little by little succeeded in calming her seething temper, which was just as well, for while she should have been used to such irruptions, it not having been the first time that feckless characters had disturbed her at night, she flew into a fury every time one of her old acquaintances, such as Harrer (to whom she had no real objection for she could happily while away the time with him—‘Now and then, of course, just now and then’), ‘showed a total disregard of her new social position’ in w