ad infinitum, and this is as perfectly clear,’ he raised his eyes to the ceiling, ‘as our helpless orbiting in space: once started it cannot be stopped.’ Eszter shut his eyes. ‘I’m feeling dizzy; I’m dizzy and, God forgive me, bored, like everyone else who has succeeded in ridding himself of the notion that there is any suggestion of rhyme or reason in making or breaking, in birth or death, in this constant and agonizing going round in circles, postulating some enormous wonderful plan rather than a cold, mechanical, blindingly simple movement … That once perhaps … in the remote past … there might have been some feeling to the contrary,’ he cast another glance at the wriggling figure of his guest, ‘is, of course, possible, but today, in this vale of tears come all too true, it might be better for us to keep silent on the subject, at least to leave the hazy memory of the being that set all this in motion to fade away in peace. Better to keep silent,’ he repeated in slightly more ringing tones, ‘and not speculate about our late creator’s no doubt exalted purposes, for as to guessing how we might best have directed them we have guessed quite enough, and clearly haven’t got anywhere in the process. We have got nowhere in this nor in anything else, because, as it is appropriate at this juncture to point out, we have not been over-generously blessed with the desirable gift of clear sight; the all-consuming over-active curiosity with which we have time and again assailed the sensible world has, not to put too fine a point on it, been far from a resounding success, and when, on the odd occasion, we have discovered some piddling secret we have immediately had cause to regret it. If you will forgive a joke in poor taste,’ he wiped his brow, ‘picture the first man to throw a stone. I throw it up, it comes down again, how splendid, he might have thought. But what really happened? I throw it up, it comes down, it strikes me on the head. The lesson is: experiment, but with caution,’ Eszter gently admonished his friend. ‘Better to be satisfied with the meagre but at least harmless truth, the validity of which we all, excepting of course your own angelic self, may prove upon our pulses; the truth that, when it comes down to it, we are simply the miserable subjects of some insignificant failure, alone in this simply marvellous creation; that the whole of human history is no more, if I may make myself clear to you, than the histrionics of a stupid, bloody, miserable outcast in an obscure corner of a vast stage, a kind of tortured confession of error, a slow acknowledgement of the painful fact that this creation was not necessarily a brilliant success.’ He reached for the glass on his bedside table, took a gulp of water, and glanced enquiringly at the armchair, establishing, not without a certain anxiety, that his faithful visitor, who had long outgrown the domestic role of selfless general help, was more than usually restless today. Clutching the suitcase full of clothes with one hand and a small slip of paper with the other, Valuska looked as if he were cowering in his own shadow or nestling between the spread petals of his never-to-be-removed postman’s cloak as the mild and sober shower of Eszter’s words fell upon him; and he was obviously more and more confused about what he should do. It seemed to Eszter that he was trying to decide whether to yield to his attentive and sympathetic nature and hear his elderly friend through without interrupting him or, rather, to follow his usual habit and, as if by way of relief, immediately give vent to the sense of wonder that overtook him as he walked like an angel through the night- and dawn-silenced streets — and as it was clearly impossible to assent to both impulses at once, Eszter was no longer surprised to see the early signs of such confusion in him. He was used to Valuska’s entrances, to see him swept through the door on a wave of agitation — it was an entrance hallowed by tradition — and accepted the fact that ‘till Valuska could master his inexpressible joy at one or other cosmic phenomenon’ it was up to Eszter to entertain his guest with his own brand of bitter and severely critical humour. This was how it had been between them for years: Eszter talked, Valuska listened, until the moment when the expression on his disciple’s face softened and gave way to the first gentle smile, when the host would be delighted to hand over to his guest, since it was not the content, only the initially passionate manner of his young friend whose answers were full of such ‘wonderful blindness and unsullied charm’ that ever disturbed him. It was one long unbroken story related in the stuttering and excitable prose his visitor had regaled him with each noon and every late afternoon for the last eight years, an endless fantasia of the planets and the stars, the sunlight, the ever-turning shadows, and the silent mechanism of the heavenly bodies orbiting overhead, which provided ‘silent proof of the existence of an ineffable intellect’ and had enchanted him all his life as he stared into the eventually over-clouded firmament on his eternal wanderings. For his part, Eszter chose not to make any objective comment on such cosmic matters, though he often joked about the ‘perpetual orbiting’ as if by way of light relief (‘No wonder,’ he once winked exaggeratedly in the direction of the armchair, ‘that after thousands of years of the earth spinning about its axis people should find themselves somewhat disorientated, since their whole attention is devoted to simply remaining on their feet …’), though later he desisted even from such interventions, regarding them as thoughtless, not only because he feared destroying Valuska’s delicate and brittle vision of the universe, but because he believed it might be a mistake to attribute the sad condition of humanity past or to come to the ‘otherwise genuinely unpleasant enough’ necessity of mankind rambling aimlessly through the universe since time immemorial. In the ascending hierarchy of their conversations, the subject of the heavens therefore lay wholly in Valuska’s territory, and this was, in every sense, fair enough: quite apart from the age-old impossibility of seeing the heavens at all through such dense clouds (so dense that even to refer to them would have been a little untactful), he was convinced that Valuska’s cosmos had no relation whatsoever to the real one; it was, he thought, an image, something remembered from childhood perhaps, only an image, of some once-glimpsed universal order, an order that had become a personal domain, clearly a luminous landscape that could never be lost, a pure religion which assumed that there was or might once have been a heavenly mechanism ‘driven by some hidden motor of enchantment and innocent dreaming’. While the local community ‘given its natural inclination’ regarded Valuska as no more than an idiot, he, for his part, was in no doubt (though he only became aware of this once Valuska took on the role of his personal meal-provider and general help) that this apparently crazy wanderer on the highways of his own transparent galaxy, with his incorruptibility and universal, if embarrassing, generosity of spirit, was indeed ‘proof that, despite the highly corrosive forces of decadence in the present age, angels nevertheless did exist’. One superfluous phenomenon, however, Eszter immediately added, did not indicate merely that people had ceased to note and were actively neglecting such beings, but that, in his own view, the refined sensibilities and spirit of observation that registered such generosity and incorruptibility as distinct virtues and ornaments did so in the certain knowledge that there was nothing, nor ever was anything, to which such virtue might refer or quality ornament, or, to put it another way, that it referred to or ornamented some singular, useless and undemonstrable form — like some kind of excess or overflow — for which ‘neither explanation, nor apology’ existed. He loved him as a lonely lepidopterist might love a rare butterfly; he loved the harmless ethereal nature of Valuska’s imagined cosmos, and he shared his own thoughts with him — about the earth naturally, which, too, in its way, passed all understanding — because beyond the guarantee of goodwill which the regular visits of his young friend represented, which guarded him ‘against the unavoidable dangers of madness resulting from complete isolation’, this one-man audience provided him with constant proof, which confirmed, beyond all doubt, the redundancy of the angelic — and absolved him of responsibility for the possibly corrupting effects of his own solemn and deeply rational views, since his painfully constructed and precise sentences bounced off the shield of Valuska’s faith as if they were the lightest of darts, or simply went straight through him without touching a nerve or causing the slightest injury. Of course, he couldn’t be absolutely sure of this, for while it was hard enough in the regular run of things to establish what Valuska’s attention was focused on, it was clear that this time his own words had no calming effect and that the most obvious causes of his nervousness were the case and the torn sheet of note-paper in his hand. Who knows whether Eszter immediately comprehended the reasons for this continuous tension, or had any notion of the import of the piece of paper Valuska was nervously clutching and twisting between his fingers, but he suspected, even on the basis of such slender evidence, that his visitor had called on him in the office of messenger rather than friend, and, since he was horrified by the sheer idea of something addressed to him or anything that might amount to a communication, he quickly replaced his glass on the bedside table, and — if only to preserve the peace of his mind and prevent Valuska speaking — pursued his own broken train of thought with a gentle but unremitting insistence. ‘While, on the one hand,’ he said, ‘our most prominent scientists, the inexhaustible heroes of this perennial confusion, have finally and somewhat unfortunately extricated themselves from the metaphor of godhead, they have immediately fallen into the trap of regarding this oppressive history as some kind of triumphant march, a supernatural progress following, what they call, the victory of “will and intellect”, and though, as you know, I am no longer capable of being the least surprised by this, I must confess to you I still cannot understand why it should be the cause of such universal celebration for them that we have climbed out of the trees. Do they think it’s good like this? I find nothing amusing in it. Furthermore it doesn’t fit us properly: you only have to consider how long, even after thousands of years of practice, we can keep going on two legs. Half a day, my dear friend, and we shouldn’t forget it. As for learning to stand upright, allow me to cite myself as example, specifically the natural history of my illness, the course of which, as you yourself know, is to deteriorate to a condition known as Bechterew’s Disease (a process my doctor, the wise Dr Provaznyik, regards as unavoidable), and that I must therefore resign myself to the fact that I must spend the remainder of my life in one simple back position, that, in short, I should continue to live, should I live at all, in a cramped and, in the strict sense of the word, stooping posture thereby atoning for and sensibly suffering the serious consequences of our thoughtlessness in assuming an erect position sometime in the remote past … Straightening up and walking on two legs therefore, my dear friend, are the symbolic starting points for our ugly historical progress, and, to tell you the truth, I am not hopeful,’ Eszter sadly shook his head, ‘that we are capable of concluding in any nobler a manner, since we regularly waste any slight chance we might have of that, as, for example, in the case of the moon landings, which, in their time, might have pointed to a more stylish farewell, and which made a great impression on me, until, soon enough, Armstrong and the others having duly returned, I had to admit the whole thing was only a mirage and my expectations vain, since the beauty of every single — however breathtaking — attempt was in some way marred by the fact these pioneers of the cosmic adventure, for reasons wholly incomprehensible to me, having landed on the moon and realized that they were no longer on earth, failed to remain there. And I, you know, to tell you the truth … well, I’d go anywhere to be out of this.’ Eszter’s voice had dropped to a whisper and he shut his eyes as if he were imagining embarking on some ultimate cosmic flight. One could not state with any great certainty that the magical attraction of this journey through space, a longer sojourn in cavernous vastness, would have dulled his appetite, yet it never lasted for more than a few seconds at a time, and though he refused to dilute the acidity of his last remark he couldn’t leave it hanging there in all its over-hasty rawness. Not to mention the fact that the temptations of this symbolic voyage were already, at the very moment of their conception, turned upside down (‘I wouldn’t get too far in any case, and however far I had got, with my bad luck, the earth would be the first thing I saw,’ or so he figured) and that his discomfort at the slightest movement was rather greater than it appeared. He had no real desire to participate in dubious ventures, nor did the thought of casual experiments in some unfamiliar situation appeal to him, since — and he never passed up the chance to draw a sharp distinction between ‘the enchantment of illusion and the misery of its fruitless pursuit’—he knew well enough that, faced with the prospect of such a dizzying journey, all he could count on would be ‘the unique quality of his own immobility’. After fifty hard years of suffering, of trying and failing to cross the swamp that constituted the town of his birth with its marsh-like foulness and suffocating stupidity, he had found a refuge from it. That intoxicating — ah, how brief — moment of daydreaming had proved utterly ineffective against it and he could hardly deny that even a short walk through its mire was beyond his powers. Not that he did deny it, of course, that was why he hadn’t left his house in years, for he felt that even a chance meeting with another citizen, the passing of a few words at the street corner he had at last carelessly ventured out to, might cancel out all the progress he had made in his retirement. Because he wanted to forget everything he had had to suffer during the decades of his so-called directorship of the academy of music: those grinding attacks of idiocy, the blank ignorant look in people’s eyes, the utter lack of burgeoning intelligence in the young, the rotten smell of spiritual dullness and the oppressive power of pettiness, smugness and low expectation under the weight of which he himself had almost collapsed. He wanted to forget the urchins whose eyes unmistakably glittered with a desire to set about that hated piano with an axe; the Grand Symphony Orchestra he was obliged to assemble from the ranks of assorted drunken tutors and misty-eyed music lovers; the thunderous applause with which the unsuspecting but enthusiastic public, month after month, rewarded this scandalous, unimaginably awful band of incompetents whose slender talents were not fit to grace a village wedding; the endless struggle educating them to music and his vain plea that they should play more than one blessed piece all the time — all those ‘continual trials’ of his