Had the inn shrunk for a moment?
Or was the world too vast?
Had they heard these words so many times
in vain,
‘the darkening sky’
and ‘the earth opening underfoot’
and ‘birds settling on their nests’,
their wild clangour
alleviating something in them once more,
but only once,
some burning itch
of which, as yet, they had no knowledge?
Hardly: they had simply, as they say, ‘left the door open’ a fraction of a second, or merely — having waited specifically for this — succeeded somehow in forgetting the ending; in any case, once the silence in the Peafeffer had stretched as far as it would go, they quickly found their tongues and, like someone who has become so absorbed in observing the lazy arc of a bird in flight that he is forced to wake suddenly from some dream of flying and sharply re-establish contact with terra firma, they found that indecisive, hazy, formless and ephemeral feeling being swept away by the startling consciousness of drifting cigarette smoke, the tin chandelier hanging above them, the empty glasses gripped tightly in their hands and the figure of Hagelmayer behind the bar, swiftly and remorselessly buttoning his overcoat. In the ensuing storm of ironic applause, they pressed flesh and administered numerous slaps on the back, congratulating the radiantly proud house-painter and the two other, by now wholly insensate, heavenly bodies and within a few seconds, Valuska, having received his glass of wine, found himself alone. Awkwardly, he withdrew from the forest of donkey jackets and quilted coats into a corner of the bar offering more air, and since he could no longer count on the others’ attention, he being once more the loner, the one truly inspired and faithful witness of the confluence of the three planets and their subsequent history, still dizzy after the presentation of the spectacle and the joy of the hubbub he assumed to be cheering he followed in splendid isolation the progress of the Moon as it swam beyond the glowing further surface of the Sun … Why? Because he wanted to see, and did in fact see, the light returning to the Earth; he wanted to feel, and did in reality feel, the fresh flood of warmth; he wanted to experience, and genuinely did experience, the deeply stirring sense of freedom that understanding brings to a man who has laboured in the terrifying, icy, judgemental shadow of fear. But there was no one to whom he could explain this or even speak about it, for the general public, as was its wont, tended not to listen to what it considered to be ‘idle chatter’, and now, with the passing of the ghostly eclipse, it regarded the performance as finished and stormed the bar in hope of a last spritzer. The return of light? The gentle flood of warmth? Profundity and liberation? At this point, Hagelmayer, who seemed to have followed Valuska’s line of thought to a T, couldn’t help but intervene: half-asleep by now, not having felt any great depth of emotion himself, he doled out the ‘last orders’, switched off the light, opened the door and sent them on their way, bellowing, ‘Out of here, you great vats of booze, out with you!’ There was nothing to be done about it, they had to resign themselves to the fact that the evening was truly over: they’d been kicked out and were forced to go their several ways. So they filed out in silence, and while the majority showed no particular desire for further entertainment, there was a couple here and there who, when Valuska bade them a warm good night at the door (it wasn’t possible to bid farewell to everyone, for some, particularly those who had been woken too suddenly and shoved out into the icy cold, were too busy throwing up against the outside wall), gazed after him as they had done the previous night and who knows how many nights before, watching as he, still under the spell of his vision, proceeded on his way with that characteristically cramped gait of his, leaning forward, head bowed, pattering on tiny feet, almost breaking into a run (‘as if he had something important to do’) down the deserted street, and they sniggered behind their hands, and then, as he turned off by the water-tower, burst into loud and healthy laughter, for there wasn’t much else to laugh about — particularly these days, when driver, warehouseman, house-painter and baker all felt as if ‘time had somehow stopped’—except Valuska, who, as they used to say, provided ‘free ‘ntertainment’, not only with his act, but with his whole appearance, with those mild fawnlike eyes ever shining, that nose, so like a carrot in both colour and length, that postbag which never left his side, and that impossibly baggy coat thrown over that skinny body of his — all this was, in some strange fashion, invariably amusing and proved an eternal fount of rare good spirits. Nor was the crowd gathered before the Peafeffer entirely wrong in its surmise, for Valuska really had ‘something important to do’. As he attempted rather shyly to explain when they shouted after him and teased him about it, he had ‘to run the full distance before bedtime’, which was to say he had to run the gamut of darkened lampposts, which, since they no longer served any useful purpose, had for the last few days been turned off at eight o’clock, so he could inspect the silent, frozen city from St Joseph’s Cemetery to Holy Trinity Cemetery, from Bárdos Ditch, across the empty squares, to the railway station, accomplishing, along the way, a complete tour of the general hospital, the law courts (incorporating the prison), and, of course, the castle and Almássy Palace (unrestorable, therefore restuccoed once every ten years). What all this was in aid of, what the point of it was, no one knew for certain, and the mystery grew no clearer when, in reply to the insistent questioning of one or other local, he suddenly reddened and proclaimed that he was ‘driven, alas, by a constant inner compulsion’; though this meant nothing more than that he was neither capable of distinguishing nor willing to distinguish between his home in what used to be the kitchen in Harrer’s backyard and the homes of everyone else, between the press office and the Peafeffer or between the railway points and the streets and tiny parks, that he couldn’t, in other words, discern any vital organic difference between his life and the lives of others, considering literally the whole town from Nagyvárad Avenue to the powdered-milk factory as his abode, and, since a landlord was bound to make his rounds on a regular, daily basis, he — trusting everyone, protected by his half-wit reputation and accustomed through the excesses of his imagination to ‘the free highways of the universe,’ in comparison with which the town appeared no more than a tiny rumpled nest — would roam the streets as blindly, as blindly and tirelessly, as he had done for the past thirty-five years. And, since his whole life was an endless tour of the inner landscape of his nights and days, his claim that he ‘had to run the full distance before bedtime’ was something of a simplification, firstly because he slept only a couple of hours before dawn (and even then fully clothed and practically awake, so it was hard to regard this as ‘bedtime’ in any conventional sense) and secondly because, as concerns this peculiar ‘run’ of his, for the last twenty years he had simply dashed about town in a harum-scarum fashion so neither Mr Eszter’s curtained room, nor the bureau, the junction, the hop, not even the pub behind the water-tower, could be properly considered stations on his eternal flight. At the same time, this ceaseless pounding of his, which by its very nature was enough to cause others to regard him less as one of their own and more as a bit of local colour to put it mildly, did not add up to some permanent, close or jealous keeping of the watch, still less as a crazy kind of alertness, though for the sake of simplicity, or by reason of a deeply implanted instinctive reaction, certain people, when invited to express their opinion, chose to regard it as such. For Valuska, disappointed in his desire to have the dizzying vaults of heaven constantly in view, had got used to staring at nothing but the ground beneath him, and consequently didn’t actually ‘see’ the town at all. In his worn-down boots, his heavy service coat, his official cap with its insignia and the strapped bag like an organic growth on his side, he made his infinite, characteristically waddling, crook-backed rounds past the decaying buildings of his birthplace, but as to seeing — he saw only the ground, the pavements, the asphalt, the cobbles and the straggling weeds that sprouted between them on roads the frozen rubbish made almost impassable, straight roads, curved roads, gradients rising or falling away, no one knew the cracks and missing paving stones better than he (he could tell precisely where he was with his eyes closed by feeling the surface through his soles), but as for the walls that aged along with him, the fences, the gates and the minute details of eaves, he remained oblivious to these for the simple reason that he could not have borne the slightest contrast between their present appearance and the picture his imagination retained of them, and so, in effect, he acknowledged only their essential reality (that they were there in other words), in much the same way as he did the country, the decades that seemed to melt into each other as they passed, and people generally. Even in his earliest memories — dating roughly from the time his father was buried — he seemed to be walking these same streets (only in essence once again, for all he really knew was the small area round Maróthy Square which, as a six-year-old child, he ventured to explore), and, truth to tell, there was hardly a chasm, nay, not even any perceptible demarcation line, between the person he had then been and the person he now was, since, even in that dim past (perhaps dating from the walk home from the cemetery?) when he was first capable of observing and comprehending, it was the same starry sky with its tiny flickering lights in the extraordinary vastnesses of space that held him captive. He gained height, grew thin, the hair on his temples had begun to grey, but, now as then, he had none of that useful sense of proportio