chaise-longue which had been dragged some time ago from one of the bedrooms, by that man lying on high plumped pillows whose practically skeletal body could only with the greatest of charity be described as gaunt, whose ruinous condition testified less to the understandable revolt of the organs than to the constant protest against the powers that attempted to slow the natural if violent process of deterioration and the spirit that had mercilessly condemned itself, for reasons of its own, to a life of ease. He lay on the bed, motionless, his hands resting exhausted on the moth-eaten blanket in a perfect image of his by-now-stable constitution, which was not in the grip of some slow progressive disorder of the bones such as Scheiermann’s Disease, nor under the threat of a sudden, potentially fatal infection, but had suffered a complete collapse, the serious consequence of allowing the muscles, the skin and the appetite to degenerate through permanent self-confinement to bed. It was the body’s protest against the soft entrapments of pillow and rug, though it would be equally true to say that this was all it was, for the wilful regime of rest which nowadays only Valuska’s visits and the usual morning and night-time rituals managed to break, that final withdrawal from the world of action and sociability, had no effect upon his determination and steadfastness of soul. The carefully groomed grey hair, the clipped moustache, the severe harmonization of his well-matched daily garments, all betrayed as much: the hems of the trousers, the starched shirt, the meticulously knotted tie and the deep maroon dressing gown, but, above all, the still-bright pale-blue eyes set in that pale face, eyes still razor sharp which had only to sweep over his decaying circumstances and his own body to register his highly efficient personal preservation and detect the tiniest signs of deterioration beneath the vulnerable surface of his charming and graceful possessions, which, he could clearly see, were all woven of the same ephemeral fabric of form as himself. And it was not only the common condition of self and domain that he perceived with such acuity, but the deep sense of kinship that undoubtedly existed between the deathly calm of the room and the lifeless cold of the world outside: the sky, like some remorseless mirror, always reflecting the same world, dully turning back the sadness that rose in billows beneath it, and in the twilight, which every day grew a little darker, showed the bare pollarded chestnut trees in the moment before their final uprooting, bent before the biting wind; the trunk-roads were deserted, the streets empty, ‘as if only stray cats and rats and a few pigs living on scraps’ remained, while beyond the town, the bleak deserted plains of the lowlands questioned even the steady gaze of reason that attempted to penetrate them — this sadness, this twilight, this barrenness and desolation, could all be said to have found an equivalent in Eszter’s drawing room with its desert-places, in the all-consuming rays emitted by the fixed dogma which united nausea, disillusion and the bed-bound routine, rays that could penetrate the armour of both form and surface, to wreck the fabric and substance; the wood and cloth, the glass and steel, of everything from floor to ceiling. ‘No, we shan’t have any more snow,’ he declared again, casting a placid, calming glance at the nervous visitor wriggling impatiently in his chair, and leaned forward to smooth ruffles in the blanket covering his feet. ‘No more snow.’ He sank back on his pillows. ‘Snow production has come to an end, therefore not one solitary drop will ever fall again, and, as you well know, my friend,’ he added, ‘between ourselves, that is the least of it …’ So saying, he waved his hand once in a single careless gesture, for he had already employed that same mild gesture countless times before to express the same thought: the fatal early frost that had descended on a dry autumn with its terrifying loss of precipitation (‘Ah, happy years, when it came down in buckets!’) could mean only one thing, sure as the toxin, the undeniable fact that nature herself had laid down her tools and finished her regular task, that the once-brotherly bond between heaven and earth was well and truly broken, and that the last act had assuredly begun wherein we were orbiting alone among the scattered detritus of our laws and ‘would soon be left staring, as fate had decreed, idiotically, uncomprehendingly, watching and shivering as the light steadily withdrew from us’. Every morning, as she was leaving, Mrs Harrer would stop at the partly opened door and unfailingly regale him with increasingly improbable horror stories, now of the water-tower that was clearly wobbling, now of the cogwheels that spontaneously began to turn in the belfry of the church in the main square (today, as it happened, she had chattered about ‘a gang of desperadoes’ and about some tree that had been uprooted in Hétvezér Passage), though he himself no longer considered these events at all improbable, and did not doubt for a moment that the tidings — despite the congenital stupidity of the messenger — were in every respect true, since for him these were absolute confirmation of that which he could not have helped guessing: the chain of cause and effect and hence the notion of predictability were both of them illusions, ‘therefore the clear light of reason was forever obscured’. ‘It’s all up with us,’ Eszter continued, his gaze slowly trawling round the room before focusing meditatively on the stove with its flying, quickly fading sparks. ‘We have failed in our thoughts, our actions and our imaginations, even in our pitiful attempts to understand why we have failed; we have lost our God, forfeited the socially restraining forms of respect owing to honour and rank, neglected to maintain our nobly misplaced belief in the eternal laws of proportion which enabled us to estimate our true worth by relating it to the degree of our failure to measure up to the ten commandments … in other words we have come a cropper, come a painful cropper in the universe which, it appears, has ever less to offer us. If one is to believe the babblings of Mrs Harrer,’ he smiled at Valuska, who was vacillating between utterance and rapt attention, ‘people are talking about apocalypse and the last judgement, because they do not know that there will be neither apocalypse nor last judgement … such things would serve no purpose since the world will quite happily fall apart by itself and go to wrack and ruin so that everything may begin again, and so proceed