der 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 witnesses to some curiously motivated, long-standing and, for all practical purposes, already decided contest, the most fearsome element of which, they had heard, was the superior contempt with which the two-man company — the owner being an apparently sickly and overweight figure calling himself ‘The Director’, the other, according to stray rumours, an enormous behemoth of a man who was once a boxer but had degenerated since into a general circus helper — treated their audiences, audiences who by any stretch of the imagination could not be accused of being fickle or indifferent. Despite what had obviously been hours of waiting there was nothing actually happening in the square, and since there was no sign that the performance would ever commence, numerous locals, including the porter, were beginning to suspect that there could be only one reason for this deliberate delay: the base pleasure taken by the whale’s attendants in knowing they could command the patience of a crowd practically frozen in the dry cold while they themselves were having a gay old time somewhere else. And, having been obliged to follow this train of thought in order to find a rational explanation, it wasn’t hard to continue along the same path and convince oneself that the ramshackle truck belonging to ‘this bunch of con-men’ contained either nothing at all, or, if anything, then a stinking corpse whose plain lack of interest they disguised by a factitious, if effective, piece of market publicity about some so-called ‘secret’ … In this and other similar sundry fashions they continued their lucubrations in the more sheltered and inconspicuous nooks of the square, while Valuska, taking absolutely no notice of the anxiety around him and still dreamy-eyed from watching the sunrise, quickly wormed his way to the front of the crowd and up to the wagon, cheerfully apologizing as he went. Nothing worried him, and he had not the slightest notion of anything out of place; indeed, having arrived at the front and taken cognizance of the enormous conveyance resting on its eight double wheels, he stared at it as if it were something out of a fairy tale, something whose very size banished the thought of disappointment. Round-eyed, he scanned the nearside of the vehicle from front to rear, shaking his head in wonder and, like a child confronted with a gift wrapped in shiny paper or done up in a beribboned box, he pondered what he might find once the package was undone. It was the curious writing on the side of the van that chiefly fascinated him; he had never seen letters or signs like it, and, having attempted to read it from both bottom to top and from right to left and failed to make any sense of it, he lightly tapped the shoulder of the person nearest to him and asked, ‘Excuse me — you wouldn’t happen to know what it says there?’ But the individual thus addressed failed to respond and having tried a second time, a little louder, and been rebuffed with a deep slow growl advising him, in effect, to shut his face, Valuska thought he too had better stand perfectly still, rooted to the spot like the others. But he couldn’t keep it up for long. He blinked twice, adjusted the strap of his bag, cleared his throat and turned to the grim figure beside him, remarking in a friendly way that he had never seen anything like it in his life, that while the occasional travelling circus might come round from time to time, it was nothing like this, not half as riveting, though he had just arrived, of course, and he simply couldn’t imagine what such an enormous creature might be stuffed with, though it was likely to be wood-shavings, and did he happen to know what the entrance fee might be since he had only some fifty or so forints and would be very sorry if he were to be refused entrance for lack of a few coins. The fellow beside him gave not the slightest sign of having heard any of this confused muttering but kept glaring at the rear of the truck with such awful intensity and seemed so oblivious to all the hubbub round him that even Valuska was rapidly forced to the conclusion that whatever the question, there was absolutely no chance of an answer from the man. At first Valuska was simply aware of a sudden tension in the crowd, then, following the direction of their gaze, he could see the corrugated tin of the truck’s rear door descending, and two fat hands — probably the ones that had clipped it there in the first place from within — sliding it down, then abruptly letting it go halfway through its descent, so when the bottom of it hit the pavement and the side struck the rim there was a tremendous clatter. Valuska, who had been swept to the front of the crowd as it pressed towards the opening, was not at all surprised to find that the whale’s domicile could apparently be opened only from the inside, for, or so he reasoned to begin with, one would naturally expect a company so unusual — and this lot certainly seemed unusual — to come up with a curious solution to such a problem. Furthermore, above and beyond all this, his attention was drawn to a great mountain of flesh, well over six feet high, standing in the now clear ‘entrance’ of the circus, a figure whose role was apparent not only from the fact that despite the intense cold he wore nothing but a dirty vest over his bulging and hairy torso (a ‘factotum’ would in any case be expected to dislike the heat), but from his badly disfigured and generally squashed nose, the effect of which was not so much fierce as foolish, lending him an air of surprising innocence. He raised his arms high into the air, gave a loud grunt as if he had just woken from a long sleep, dropped lightly down among the crowd gathered about the opening, dragged the corrugated sheet reluctantly to one side and propped the battered object up against the truck, then, having lowered three wide wooden boards from the platform, he got out of the way, grabbed hold of a flat metal box and started selling tickets with an expression of such utter weariness and boredom it seemed that neither the line of customers shuffling up the rather shaky ramp nor the almost unbearably tense air of expectancy was of the slightest interest to him; heaven or hell, what’s the difference, as people in those parts used to say. Valuska stood in the line quivering with excitement, clearly enjoying everything: audience, wagon, the iron box, the ticket collector. With a grateful glance at the indifferent behemoth before him he thanked the ticket collector as he took his ticket, relieved that his purse would bear the expense, tried once more to enter into conversation with his ever changing neighbours, then, when his turn finally came round, he too picked his way carefully across the creaking boards, and stepped into the half-lit enormous vacancy of the ‘whale-house’. On a low platform of beams and girders, precisely as the hand-written sign hung on its side proclaimed, lay the terrifying hulk of a ‘sensational blahval’, though any attempt to read the rest of the tiny chalked inscription and thus enlighten oneself as to what exactly a ‘blahval’ might be was bound to result in failure since anyone wishing to hesitate before it was carried forward by the slow press of the crowd behind. The huge creature facing him needed neither pointing out nor rational explanation; Valuska muttered the mysterious name under his breath as he took in the far from common sight, open-mouthed, gaping, with a mixture of fear and wonder. Seeing the whale did not mean he could grasp the full meaning of the sight, since to comprehend the enormous tail fin, the dried, cracked, steel-grey carapace and, halfway down the strangely bloated hulk, the top fin, which alone measured several metres, appeared a singularly hopeless task. It was just too big and too long: Valuska simply couldn’t see it all at once, and failed even to get a proper look at its dead eyes. Having managed to insert himself into the continually shuffling line, he finally reached the creature’s jaws, which were ingeniously displayed wide open, but whether he stared down its dark throat, or tore his gaze away to survey its exterior to discover the two tiny eyes sunk in deep sockets on either side of the body, and noted the two vents in the lower brow above them, he was aware of seeing these things in isolat