friend. And though he was at a loss to understand how he had qualified himself for his friendship and why Mr Eszter did not elect some other person to be the recipient of this distinction (someone capable of accurately grasping and noting the motions of his mind, motions that, as he himself admitted, he understood only vaguely at best), from that day forth he felt it was his responsibility to rescue him from the deadly slough of bitterness and disillusion which threatened to engulf not only him but the entire town. Contrary to what anyone might think, it had not escaped Valuska’s notice, the evidence being so readily available, that everyone he met was preoccupied by the notion of ‘the collapse into anarchy’, a state that, in the general opinion, was no longer avoidable. Everyone was talking about ‘the unstoppable stampede into chaos’, the ‘unpredictability of daily life’ and ‘the approaching catastrophe’ without a clear notion of the full weight of these frightening words, since, he surmised, this epidemic of fear was not born out of some genuine, daily increasing certainty of disaster but of an infection of the imagination whose susceptibility to its own terrors might eventually lead to an actual catastrophe, in other words the false premonition that a man who had lost his bearings might succumb to once the inner structure of his life, the way his joints and bones were knit, had loosened and he carelessly transgressed the ancestral laws of his soul — if he simply lost control of his undemeaningly ordered world … It bothered him greatly that however he tried to persuade his friends of this they refused to listen to him, but it saddened him most when in tones of unrelieved gloom they proclaimed that the period they were living in was ‘an unfathomable hell between a treacherous future and an unmemorable past’, for such awful thoughts reminded him of the sentiments and unremittingly painful monologues he was used to hearing on a daily basis in the house on Béla Wenckheim Avenue, which was where he had just arrived. Even more depressing than this was that, however he would have liked to, it was impossible to deny that Mr Eszter — blessed as he was with the most refined poetic sensibility, incomparable delicacy and indeed all the great gifts of the spirit — who, as a clear sign of friendship never failed to spend at least half an hour playing — to him, with his tin ear! — passages from the famous Bach — was the most disillusioned of all, and while he put much of this down to the general debility occasioned by his illness and the oppressive monotony of being bed-bound, he blamed himself entirely for the extended convalescence and could only hope that if he carried out his duties ever more carefully, ever more thoroughly, eventually there might be the prospect of a complete recovery, and his great friend might finally be free of the darkness occasioned by the ‘apparently inoperable cataracts’ of his soul. He never stopped believing that the moment might arrive, and now, as he entered the house and negotiated the long book-lined hall, and considered whether to begin his account with events associated with the dawn, the whale or Mrs Eszter, he felt the period of convalescence might be finally over, that that ardently wished-for moment of full recovery might actually be at hand. He stopped before the familiar door, transferred the heavy case to his other hand and thought of that uplifting all-forgiving light that — should that moment have arrived — was waiting to shine upon Mr Eszter. Because there would be something worth seeing then, something worth discovering — he knocked three times as was his custom — since he would then be granted a vision of that incorruptible order, under whose aegis a boundless and beautiful power comprehended in one harmonious whole the dry land and the sea, the walkers and the sailors, heaven and earth, water and air and all those who lived in mutual dependence, whose life was just opening out or already flying by; he would see that birth and death were only two tremendous moments in an eternal waking, and his face would glow with amazement as he understood this; he would feel — gently he grasped the copper handle of the door — the warmth of the mountains, woods, rivers and valleys, would discover the hidden depths of human existence, would finally understand that the unbreakable ties that bound him to the world were not imprisoning chains and condemnation but a kind of clinging to an indestructible sense that he had a home; and he would discover the enormous joys of mutuality which embraced and animated everything: rain, wind, sun and snow, the flight of a bird, the taste of fruit, the scent of grass; and he would suspect that his anxieties and bitterness were merely cumbersome ballast required by the live roots of his past and the rising airship of his certain future, and, then — he started opening the door — he would finally know that our every moment is passed in a procession across dawns and day’s-ends of the orbiting earth, across successive waves of winter and summer, threading the planets and the stars. Suitcase in hand, he stepped into the room and stood there blinking in the half-light.