n, 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 under bare weeping willows, down to the bridge of the German Quarter, where he turned off towards the Wallachian cemetery — wholly ignoring the silent and immobile crowds who seemed to have taken possession of the whole town, crowds comprising precisely those people to whom — but he had no way of guessing this — his fate would be inextricably linked for the foreseeable future. He moved untroubled through that desolate landscape, among the crowds, among abandoned buses and cars, moving as he did through his own life, like a tiny planet unwilling to enquire what gravitational field he moves in, entirely consumed by the joyful knowledge that he may play his part, however humble, in a scheme of such monumental calm and precision. In Hétvezér Passage he ran into a fallen poplar, but his interest was roused not by the tree’s bare crown lying in the gutter but by the slowly dawning sky above it, and it was the same later in the Komló Hotel, where he called in to warm himself up in the night porter’s stuffy glass compartment, when the porter, still red after his exertions earlier in the evening, told him about the enormous circus truck he had seen (‘… Yesterday, it must have been, about eight or nine o’clock …’) rolling through the street (‘You’ve never seen the like of it, János! It knocks your vast cosmos into a cocked hat, mate …!’), for it was the approaching dawn that held him in its spell, that ‘promise kept each morning’ that the earth, along with the town and his own person, would emerge from beneath the shadow of night, and that the delicate glimmer of dawn would yield to the bright light of day … The porter might have said anything at all, might have described the crowds apparently hypnotized by ‘what everyone says is its uncanny attraction’, might have suggested to him later, as they were standing before the hotel entrance, that they should set out there and then to see it for themselves (‘This you just have to see, old chum’), but Valuska — pleading that he had to visit the depot first and pick up the papers — would have taken no notice of him, for though he too, in his own fashion, was curious about the whale, he wanted to remain alone under the brightening sky and stare — as far as he could, for thick impenetrable clouds covered the sky — into ‘the well of heaven, whence proceeds that inexhaustible light until the advent of night’. The way was rather a struggle, for between the railway points and the station dense waves of people were pressing forward, and being used to scuttling along rather fast he found himself constantly having to apply the brakes if he wished to avoid collisions on the narrow pavement, though he was barely aware of struggling for there was something about drifting in this solemn flood of humanity in a state of cosmic awareness that made it seem the most natural of activities, and, hardly noticing the surprising multitude, he absorbed himself ever more deeply in what, for him, were moments of exaltation as an insignificant inhabitant of the planet earth which was even now turning its face towards the sun, an exaltation so intense that by the time he finally reached the market end of the boulevard again (his bag filled with some fifty copies of an old newspaper since, as he discovered at the depot, copies of the new ones had once again gone astray), he wanted to cry aloud that people should forget about the whale and gaze, each and every one of them, at the sky … Unfortunately the frozen and impatient crowd, which by now occupied almost the whole of Kossuth Square, instead of the sparkling expanse of heaven above saw only an inconsolably bleak, tin-coloured mass before them, and, judging by the tension — rather unusual, one would have said, for the appearance of a circus act, an almost ‘tangible’ tension — of the wait, it was obvious that nothing would have dragged their attention away from the purpose of their pilgrimage. What was hardest of all to understand was what they wanted here, what drew them so remorselessly on to what after all was only a circus bill, since the question of how they could tell how much of the doomy prognostications of ‘the fifty-metre truck-load’ was true or whether there was any basis at all to the absurd gossip regarding the ‘spellbound mob’ that was supposed to have grown by now into a kind of army that followed the whale from village to village and town to town was something that the individual locals who had ventured into Kossuth Square (the night porter being counted among such brave spirits) could easily answer, for the exhausted and impoverished-looking mass and the terrifying blue-painted tin colossus spoke eloquently for themselves. They spoke for themselves without betraying anything of importance, for while the sheer phenomenon was enough to prove that those ‘sober-minded, common-sense people’ who only yesterday were declaring ‘the whole thing’ to be no mystery, simply the usual clever trick employed by travelling circuses to create interest, were wrong, and the apparently baseless gossip regarding it was true, the few local citizens who had wandered into the square were, understandably enough, still at a loss to explain either the constant flow of new arrivals or the spell of the advertised gigantic whale. According to townspeople this shadowy army was drawn from the surrounding district, and while the local origin of the by now at least three hundred people was not to be questioned (for where else could they have come from but nearby villages and hamlets, those bleak outer suburbs of Vésztö, Sarkad, Szentbenedek and Kötegyán), no one could really believe that thiry years after the Flowering of the Nation, with its high-sounding plans, there should still remain so large a rabble of frightening, villainous-looking, good-for-nothing, possibly threatening characters thirsting after the crudest and most vulgar of miracles. Putting aside the twenty or thirty figures who, for some reason or other, did not seem to fit (and these later turned out to be the most determined among them), the close on three hundred remaining were notably of a kind, and the very appearance of three hundred fur jackets, quilted waistcoats, coarse woollen overcoats and greasy peasant hats, to say nothing of three hundred pairs of iron-heeled boots, all of which suggested a deep affinity, was quite enough to transform an active curiosity, such as that felt by the night porter, who watched the mob from a respectful distance, into fraught concern. But there was something else: the silence, that stifled, unbroken, ill-omened silence in which not a single voice rang out, and hundreds of people waited, growing impatient, yet obstinately stoical and utterly silent, ready to stir once the acute suspense associated with such events gave way to the ecstatic roar of the ‘performance’, each individual isolated as if he had nothing to do with anyone else, as though it was of no concern to anyone why everyone else happened to be there, or, conversely, as if they were all part of an enormous chain-gang in which the ties that bound them negated all possibility of escape thereby rendering pointless any communication or conversation between them. The nightmarish silence was, however, only one reason for this state of ‘terminal anxiety’; the other undoubtedly lay hidden in that monstrous truck besieged by the multitude, as the porter and other similarly curious observers might immediately surmise, for there was neither handle nor grip nor any kind of chink in that riveted tin box, nothing at all that might suggest a door, and therefore it seemed (however impossible it might be to apprehend) that here, before the eyes of several hundred spectators, stood a contraption without any opening whatsoever at front, rear or side, and that the throng confronting it was in effect attempting to pry it open through sheer dumb obstinacy. And the fact that this tension and anxiety in the lingering crowd was not to be relaxed by any means owed not a little to the common feeling that the relationship between whale and audience was, probably, entirely one way. In the circumstances it was apparent that what had brought them here was not so much the keen anticipation of attending an unusual spectacle, but, much more likely, a sense that they were witnes