fundamentum of the place, and standing there for a while in vacant contemplation he suddenly had a vision of the houses, trees, lampposts and advertisement hoardings sinking right through it. Could this, he wondered, be a form of the last judgement? No trumpets, no riders of the apocalypse but mankind swallowed without fuss or ceremony by its own rubbish? ‘Not an altogether surprising end,’ thought Eszter, adjusting his scarf, then, having come to this neat full stop and considering his own investigations at an end, prepared to move off. But, understandably enough, he felt rather uncertain about the sheer idea of stepping from the solid concrete of the gateway to the frozen marsh of the pavement for that solid, static, infernal layer of waste in aspic had the knack of appearing both thick and thin, both substantial and brittle at once: like a pond with one day’s covering of ice, it might crack as soon as you put any weight on it. As a concept, it was thick and unbreakable, the top layer of an infinite mass: as substance though it looked wafer thin, a distinctly hazardous surface incapable of sustaining him; and while he stood there, vacillating between the prospects of moving or remaining, the spirit of loathing and resistance rose up in him once again and he decided that ‘owing to unforeseen circumstances’ he would simplify Mrs Eszter’s prescribed modes of procedure and pass the list she had left him to whoever happened to come along: let them arrange the affairs under his name, affairs that, with the town in this condition, he was wholly unfitted to deal with, let them get on with what remained of organizational matters; as for him, he decided, he should make his way home as quickly as his sanity, the state of his health and the petrified lava of lunar rubbish allowed. Unfortunately there was precious little chance of meeting anyone, the only visible life-form along Béla Wenckheim Avenue being a hardier species of cat, great softly padding packs of them, guarding, in their indolent way, the frozen residue of objects which still held significance for them, but from which, as far as everyone else was concerned, the weight of meaning had been lifted like some unspecified burden. They were overweight creatures, grown visibly feral, born out of a long dream, who, in these favourable circumstances, were clearly reverting to their ancient predatory instincts, witnesses, tsars of a long-expected dark age that seemed as if it would go on for ever, the new lords of a town where ‘as far as he saw, the signs of a progressive and general decadence were all too evident’. No one could doubt that these cats were afraid of nothing, and, right on cue, as if to prove it, an individual beast in one of the packs, one that, judging by the half-rat between its jaws, had clearly not gone hungry, having recognized potential prey in the figures of two members of the former master race in the gateway, was approaching them with an air of insolent audacity. Eszter did not accord any special significance to the cats, but, once he noticed them, made a shooing movement with his hand which was intended to frighten them off, a gesture wasted on the uninhibited rabble that had apparently stuffed itself to the point of nausea; and, since the deference once owing to his species was no longer forthcoming at a mere gesture, its only effect being a cautious minor retreat on the part of the pack, it seemed he would have to resign himself to their company; and so it proved, for, having resolved to move off (and thereby put an end to all that vacillation) and set out in the direction of the cinema and the Komló Hotel, they found that the cats, instead of leaving them alone, ‘as if recognizing, in their instinctive animal way, the change in their relative status’, continued to follow them a good part of the way, at least as far as the hotel where Valuska picked up Eszter’s dinner and stowed it in his lunch-box, at which point, like detectives grown tired of tailing a suspect, they simply gave up and dispersed to forage among the most recent-looking of the piles of rubbish, resorting to their keen primitive sense of smell as they searched for scraps of meat, chicken bones or, indeed, live rats. The whole place looked as if an unruly carnival had not long ago passed that way: dangerous piles of broken glass and shards of bottles of cheap spirits lay before the deserted hotel entrance while, on the other side of the street, a gutted and vandalized bus, which seemed to have collapsed in mid-genuflection about its broken axle, stood with its hood up against Schuster’s haberdashery shop as if someone had given it a vague shove in that direction. Soon enough Valuska rejoined Eszter and they reached the Chez Nous Café, from where, according to Mrs Harrer, the famous poplar tree ought to have been visible (the one which had apparently got so bored with gripping the soil it let go its hold and collapsed, like some harmless giant, across the narrow width of Hétvezér Passage). Eszter, who was undoubtedly still dazed by the general experience of being outside but was thinking only of the rubbish, drew his companion’s attention to it. ‘Tell me, my friend, do you see what I see?’ But it was pointless trying to share his astonishment with him: that was plain the moment he opened his mouth, for, after a moment of confusion (in himself or in the other man?), the merest glance at Valuska’s shining face revealed that, having concluded his account of his dawn reveries, his mind was altogether elsewhere, as indeed it would be, thought Eszter, in one who had spent an eternity wandering the city streets and still did not notice anything unusual in this nightmare landscape — and the beaming expression on the face of his escort on this mournful shuffling walk was perfect demonstration of the fact that he regarded it almost as a kind of negation of the filth underfoot; it was as if the whole occasion were in some way uplifting, and that it was only due to some hallucination, born out of his own weakness and astonishment, that Eszter, having realized his mistake far too late, had stumbled across a ghost town where the old town had been. Ever since they had left the house he had concentrated solely on observing and assessing the situation, had hardly heard what the other man said, and if he had been aware of his presence at all it was merely because their arms were linked; so it was strange that now, suddenly, in understanding everything too late, he saw that there was but one proper target for his attention, that being the figure beside him, the man wearing a cap and a coarse, enormous postman’s cloak, that blissfully meandering conveyor of provisions, Valuska himself. Up to this point — having so far, mistakenly, assumed he was dealing with a doomed but still functioning society — it had not occurred to him that the strictly reliable system of regular lunch-time and early-afternoon ‘angelic visitations’, not to mention his own unalterable daily routine, had, in effect, been organized by Valuska, and that his friend’s strange, yet by now seemingly natural, punctuality might be in some way vulnerable to external circumstances; but now, on this day, a day which might justifiably be regarded as special, here before the Chez Nous Café, for the first time in all their long acquaintanceship, Eszter suddenly became aware of the great risks his companion had been running, albeit unwittingly, and was seized with a terrible anxiety. He saw this ultimate version of the last human environment, and could, at the same moment, for the first time, understand and imagine Valuska’s life, how, without knowing quite where he was or to what threat he might be vulnerable, this innocent, unsuspecting creature, blinded by the starlight of his own internal solar system (‘Like a rare endangered butterfly lost in flight in a burning forest …’), had spent his days and nights roaming through this potentially lethal heap of rubbish, and, having understood this, Eszter could draw but one conclusion, which was that he couldn’t rely on himself alone but required the assistance of his faithful companion, which thought, in turn, led him to decide there and then that, if they ever succeeded in finding their way home again, he would never again let Valuska out of his sight. For decades he had acted in the belief that his intellect and sensibility led him to reject a world whose products were unbearable to either intellect or sensibility, but were always available for criticism by the same, but now, stepping from Hétvezér Passage into the funereal silence of Tanács Street, he was forced to concede that all his clear thinking and stubborn adherence to the principles of so-called ‘sober ratiocination’ counted for nothing, since as long as this town, which he took to be representative of the world, persisted in maintaining its lethal reality, that earthy muddy smell he found such a particularly terrible trial would persist in emanating from it. It was no use struggling; he had to understand that his customary Eszterian mode of wit was of no help to him here, for the phrases he thought of failed abysmally to establish his proud superiority over the world; the meanings of words had faded like the light in a run-down flashlight, the objects words might have referred to had crumbled under the weight of the fifty or so years that had passed and given way to the unlikely trappings of a Grand Guignol stage-set in the face of which every sober word and thought confusingly lost its meaning. With such a world, in which statements employing tropes such as ‘as’ and ‘as if’ had lost their cutting edge; in an empire that was prepared to sweep away, or so he believed, not ignorance or opposition but whatever did not fit there; with such a ‘reality’, as Eszter conceived it with a shudder of disgust and repulsion, he had nothing to do — though at this precise minute it would have been very difficult for him to deny that to enter this labyrinth and then make such mad grandiosely dignified declarations could hardly be regarded as anything but eccentric. However, this did not stop him making them and, on their next stop, at the newsagent’s stall in Tanács Street, the friendly newsvendor misunderstood him and tried to explain, by way of reassurance, that he knew the reason for this ‘strange depopulation’, launching so enthusiastically forth on his explanation that it concentrated Eszter’s mind solely on the task of getting home as soon as his mission had been accomplished, and, should he by good fortune have succeeded in accomplishing that, henceforth staying there. For he had lost all interest in what was happening out here, in what calamity would follow the tide of rubbish, in fact he had lost interest in everything except how someone who had blundered into the arena might seek safer soil ‘before the performance was over’, how he might disappear like ‘a gentle melody in the midst of cacophony’ and be hidden away indoors, secreted where nobody could ever find him; and this thought kept nagging away like some faint persistent recollection that at least one figure representative of him—‘some strangled, orphaned, vaguely poetic sensibility’—had, once upon a time, really, quite physically existed. With half an ear he was listening to Valuska’s rapt account of his experiences of the morning, something about a whale in Kossuth Square that attracted not only the local townsfolk, but (an obvious if forgivable exaggeration) ‘positively hundreds of people from the surrounding countryside’, but, truth to tell, he could cope with only one thought at a time, that being the problem of how long they had to turn the house on the avenue into an impregnable fortress that could withstand whatever chance could throw at it. ‘That’s where everyone is,’ his companion announced, and as they made their way up the main street towards the corner where the Water Board stood (its name had attracted a certain sarcasm in the last few months), he entered ever more feverishly into speculation about how marvellous it would be if, as a fitting climax to their excursion, they could view this once-in-a-lifetime monster together, and indeed Valuska’s description of the circus-owner with his squashed nose and soiled vest, of the hours of waiting by the so-called masses who flooded the market square, the whale’s enormous p