He stopped in the half-light, smiling in confusion, and, since Eszter was all too well acquainted with his pathetic and overwrought emotional state on arrival, he calmed him, gesturing, as if by way of greeting, in a manner impossible to refuse, that he should take his customary place at the table used for smoking, thaw himself out after his frosty journey and wait for the fire of his enthusiasm to die down while his old friend amused him with a few well-chosen observations. ‘We won’t be having any more snow then,’ he began without preamble, delighted to continue his previous, solitary train of thought, thereby subsuming all the things that had preoccupied him since morning once the time allowed for washing and dressing had elapsed and Mrs Harrer had, to his greatest relief, departed, ‘as one might boldly state judging from the state of the world at this moment in time’. It would not have been his style to get up and check the validity of such an authoritative statement with his own eyes, to ask the excited visitor currently sitting in the armchair to draw the heavy curtains, stare at the melancholy empty street and observe sheets of newsprint running before swirling waves of icy wind and paper bags passionately swooping between tomb-like houses frozen into silence, in a word to look out on his behalf, for to look out through the enormous windows clearly intended for better days was, in his opinion — he being a master of resistance to redundant gesture — utterly pointless since an act in itself could never be worthwhile given that the question to which it appeared to provide an answer was probably the wrong question, therefore the only question of any importance on waking, to wit whether it was snowing outside or not, could be settled just as well from his present position on the bed facing away from the firmly curtained casement windows, for the peace associated with Christmas, the happy ringing of bells, the very snow itself was somehow forgotten in this eternal winter — if this harsh regime of penetrating cold, when the last, light passion of his own existence was to decide what was to face ruin first: the house or its inhabitant, could be called winter at all. As regards the former, it was still standing after a fashion, despite the fact that Mrs Harrer, who was hired to light the fire at dawn — and no more — came round once a week under the guise of cleaning and, armed with her broom and the rags she called her dusters, set about the house to such effect that she seemed to be trying to accomplish inside that which the frost was very effectively doing outside: she flapped about violently with the rag; lithe and ready for combat, time and again, with inimitable ill-luck, she assailed the hall, the kitchen, the dining room and the rooms at the back; week after week, while little ornaments showered about her, she went about her scrubbing with generous lashings of water and shoved around sensitive pieces of furniture with cracked surfaces and highly unstable legs; in the name of cleaning she occasionally broke a piece or two of the delicate Viennese and Berliner dinner service, so he might reward her good intentions — much to the decided satisfaction of local antique dealers — with a silver spoon or a volume bound in leather; in other words she swept and wiped and washed and tidied everything so remorselessly that the poor building, attacked both inside and out and by now in a perilous state, offered only one place of refuge where things might remain as they used to be — the spacious drawing room, where this ‘ham-fisted champion of domestic order’ (‘Disturb the director at his work? Certainly not!’) never dared to enter. Of course it was impossible to tell her to stop and occupy herself solely with that for which she was paid, for apart from the implied rudeness this might involve — and Eszter always avoided having to give orders or indeed anything that smacked of decision — it was clear that the woman, even if she could not gain access to him or his immediate surroundings, driven as she was by some mysterious force of charity, felt obliged to enter the bitter lists of battle against whatever objects still remained unbroken and would continue even if she were expressly forbidden, a predicament that offered the owner no option but the safe harbour of his own drawing room, which was not altogether an imposition since here he could be understood to pursue the alleged musicological research which enhanced his reputation in the town, and since this misconception kept Mrs Harrer at bay he had no cause to fear for the delicate ornaments and furnishings immediately surrounding him, and, what was more, could be certain that owing to this fortunate misapprehension nothing would disturb him in his real mission, which he referred to as his ‘strategic withdrawal in face of the pathetic stupidity of so-called human progress’. The stove with its graceful copper feet was ‘merrily blazing’ as they say, and as it happens, this was the only item in the room which did not immediately betray the fact that time had terminally ravaged it: for the once-splendid Persian rugs, the silk wallpaper, the useless chandelier dangling from the cracked ceiling rose, the two carved armchairs, the settee, the marble-covered smoking table, the etched mirror, the dull, precarious Steinway and the countless cushions, tapestries, pieces of porcelain bric-à-brac, all these inherited memorials of the family drawing room, each and every one of them, had long ago given up the hopeless struggle and the only thing that prevented them from crumbling and disintegrating where they stood was, in all likelihood, the ten years’ worth of dust that thickly insulated them and, perhaps, his own mild, permanent, practically stationary presence. Continued presence and involuntary vigilance, however, do not in themselves constitute a state of health nor a particularly powerful assertion of the life-force, since, after all, the most funereal of positions was undoubtedly taken by the faithful occupant of the once ornamental