ing 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 proportion, nor could he ever develop anything of the sort, which might have helped him distinguish between the continuous flux of the universe of which he constituted a part (though a necessarily fleeting part) and the passage of time, the perception of which might have led to an intuitive and wise acceptance of fate. Despite vain efforts to understand and experience what precisely his ‘dear friends’ wanted from each other, he confronted the slow tide of human affairs with a sad incomprehension, dispassionately and without any sense of personal involvement, for the greater part of his consciousness, the part entirely given over to wonder, had left no room for more mundane matters, and (to his mother’s inordinate shame and the extreme amusement of the locals) had ever since then trapped him in a bubble of time, in one eternal, impenetrable and transparent moment. He walked, he trudged, he flitted — as his great friend once said, not entirely without point—‘blindly and tirelessly … with the incurable beauty of his personal cosmos’ in his soul (for decades now he had gazed at the same sky above him, and trod much the same route of concrete and weeds beneath), and if his life had anything that might be called a history at all, it consisted of those thirty-five years of ever deepening orbits from the time he left the immediate precincts of Maróthy Square to when his tours encompassed the whole town, for the startling truth was that in every other respect he remained exactly what he had been in childhood and whatever has been said about his destiny the same, with equal justice, might be said about his mind, which underwent no significant change, for the sense of awe — even over twice thirty-five years — is ahistorical. It would, however, be a mistake to believe (as did, for example, the denizens of Peafeffer, albeit behind his back) that he took no notice of anything around him, that he had no idea that people regarded him as a halfwit, and, above all, that he was unaware of the malicious nudges and winks he attracted, which he accepted as his lot. He recognized these things perfectly clearly, and whenever a voice, in the inn or on the streets, in the Komló or up the junction, broke in on his ethereal circuit with a loutish cry of, “Ere János, how’s things in the cosmos?’ he detected the simple goodwill beneath the mocking tones, and guiltily, like anyone caught with ‘his head in the clouds’, he blushed, averted his eyes and, in a faint falsetto voice, mumbled something by way of answer. For he himself acknowledged that, possessed as he was by a vision of which ‘the regal calm of the universe’ would be an inadequate description, the mere glimpse of which he barely deserved and on explanations of which he was constantly willing to launch forth in an attempt to share his slender knowledge (as he tried to share whatever he had) with the limited audience of the frequently depressive Mr Eszter and his cronies in the Peafeffer, he was occasionally quite properly reminded that he should attend as much to his sorry state and lamentable uselessness as to the hidden delights of the universe. Not only did he understand the irreversible verdict of the public, but — and this was no secret — he largely agreed with it, often proclaiming himself to be ‘a real fool’ who would not quarrel with the obvious and knew what enormous debt of gratitude he owed to the town who did not ‘lock him up where he belonged’, but tolerated the fact that despite all his expressions of regret he was incapable of withdrawing his eyes from that which ‘God had created for all eternity’. How contrite he actually felt, Valuska never said, but in any case he was genuinely incapable of directing the gaze of those much mocked ‘brilliant eyes’ anywhere but the sky: though one did not have to, nor could one, believe this in the literal sense, if for no other reason than that the immaculate work, ‘God’s eternal creation’, at least here in the sheltered valley of the Carpathian mountains, was shrouded in almost permanently thick mist, comprised now of damp fog, now of impenetrable cloud, so Valuska was compelled to rely on his memory of ever shorter summers, summers that year by year imperceptibly had become still more fleeting, and was, therefore, almost from the very beginning, forced, however cheerfully, to relive — in Mr Eszter’s characteristically adroit phrase—‘his brief glimpse of ever clarifying totality’ while studying the thick relief map of rubbish on uneven pavements in the annually gathering gloom. The sheer brilliance of his vision could crush him one moment and resurrect him the next, and although he could talk of nothing else (believing as he did that ‘the matter was in everyone’s interest’), his command of language was such that he could never begin, even vaguely, to explain what it was that he did see. When he declared that he knew nothing of the universe, they neither believed nor understood him, but it was quite true: Valuska really did know nothing about the universe, for what he knew was not exactly knowledge. He had no sense of proportion and was entirely lacking the compulsive drive to reason; he was not hungry to measure himself, time and time again, against the pure and wonderful mechanism of ‘that silent heavenly clockwork’ for he took it for granted that his great concern for the universe was unlikely to be reciprocated by the universe for him. And, since this understanding of his extended to life on earth generally and the town in which he lived particularly — for it was his experience that each history, each incident, each movement and each act of the will was part of an endless repetitive cycle — his relationship to his fellow human beings was governed by the same unconscious assumption; being unable to detect mutability where there plainly wasn’t any, he made like the raindrop relinquishing hold of the cloud which contained it, and simply surrendered to the ceaseless execution of his preappointed task. He passed beneath the water-tower and circumnavigated the enormous concrete ring lined by the sleepy oaks of the Göndölcs Gardens, but because he had done this in the afternoon, in the morning, yesterday and the day before, in fact on countless mornings, noons, afternoons and evenings before, now, when he turned back and started down Híd Road, the street parallel with the main trunk road, it made no sense for him to draw any distinction between this experience and any other, so he drew none. He cut across the junction with Erdélyi Sándor Road, waving in an amiable manner to a solemn and immobile group of people gathered round the artesian well (though they were mere blots and shadows to him), made his familiarly waddling way to the bottom of Híd Road and, skirting the station, dropped into the news-stall and drank a scalding cup of tea with the railwayman who, having being frightened by ‘some enormous vehicle’, complained about the ‘awful weather’ and the chaotic timetable — and this was more, we should say, than a formal repetition of what had happened the previous day or the day before that, it was identical, precisely the same steps proceeding in precisely the same direction, as if it possessed that complete and indivisible unity underlying all appearance of movement and direction, a unity which can concentrate any human event into one infinite moment … He heard the warning whistle of the sleeper from Vésztö (a chance arrival, off timetable, as usual), and when the rusty engine ground to a halt before the perplexed but saluting stationmaster, he took a quick look through the news-stall’s window at the unexpected apparition and the suddenly crowded platform, thanked the railwayman for the tea and, taking his leave of him, made his way through the huddled masses looking lost beside the heavily puffing engine, and crossed the station forecourt so as to continue past the stray cats of Béla Werckheim Avenue — not following just any old route down it but placing his feet in his own bootprints along the frosted and sparkling pavement. Adjusting the strap of his bag, which kept slipping off his shoulder, he twice circumnavigated the law courts and the attached prison, made a few tours of the castle and the Almássy Palace, ran along the banks of the Körös Canal un