and to top it all! bawled Mr Mádai, and to top it all, here comes this circus to wreck our last faint hopes of restoring order, a circus featuring some dreadful vast whale we have allowed into town out of the goodness of our hearts, against which now nothing can be done. Especially since the really strange events of last night, Nadabán dropped his voice; something more sinister than anything so far, Mádai nodded; since this extraordinarily evil-looking company, Volent’s brow wrinkled, arrived in Kossuth Square. Completely ignoring Valuska, who stared at them with a mixture of sadness and confusion, they addressed themselves to Eszter, explaining that it was bound to be some criminal conspiracy, though it was hard to see what it meant, what it was aimed at, or even to establish the basic facts. ‘There are at least five hundred of them!’ they claimed, but went on to say that there were really only two people involved in the company; one moment it was the star item itself that was the most frightening (they had seen it!), the next it seemed to be merely a diversion from the rise of some kind of mob that was only waiting for night to fall before attacking the peaceful populace; one moment the whale had nothing to do with it, the next it was the cause of all the trouble, and when, finally, they claimed that the ‘shady band of brigands’ was already engaged in looting and rapine and standing immobile in the square at the same time, Eszter decided he had had enough and raised his hand to signal that he wanted to speak. He was interrupted before he could start by Volent, who declared that people were frightened; we cannot stand by and twiddle our thumbs, Nadabán interjected; not while they are plotting our doom, Mádai added in his characteristic fashion. There are children here, Nadabán wiped away a tear; and weeping mothers, Mádai trumpeted; and the most precious thing of all, hearth and home, the family, Volent added, his voice trembling with emotion, all under a terrible threat … One could imagine where this chorus of lamentation might have led if the chorus were not interrupted; one could only imagine since no one would ever know, for they found themselves so weighed down by the air of general gloom they had temporarily run out of breath. Eszter seized the initiative and, bearing in mind the wretched state of their nerves and the tortured condition of their souls, announced that there was, he was pleased to say, a solution: the situation may yet be turned to advantage and secured by a powerful sense of commitment. Without further ado he presented them with the essential programme of the movement for A TIDY YARD, AN ORDERLY HOUSE, the central concern of which, he explained as he looked away somewhere in the distance above their heads, spoke for itself, and if his friends would allow him he would assume the role of ‘ombudsman-in-chief for waste’ and ‘general inspector of refuse’, adding only that he did not doubt for a second the success of their mutual collaboration nor the effective organizational powers of the three gentlemen before him. It was as much as he could do to wait while Valuska handed over the programme for action and explained it all in the most exhaustive detail, and once his companion had finished, he turned on his heels and, compressing the whole act of farewell into a single wave of the hand, left them to digest the information for themselves. He was certain that the seed of Mrs Eszter’s generative words had fallen on fertile soil and that there was nothing more for him to do but to wipe the events of the last quarter of an hour from his mind as thoroughly as he could, so that when his audience of three recovered from his abrupt departure and broke into a spontaneous ecstasy of passion, crying, ‘We shall overcome! Wonderful idea! Solidarity! Common sense! Vigilance!’ he would no longer hear it, and so, drawing strength from the slender comfort that, having exercised his powers of patience to absolute breaking point, he had at least finally rid himself of the burden of his task, he returned to his incomplete plans and tried to think as carefully as he could through possible courses of action. He was aware that news of ‘the successful completion of his assignment’ had to reach his wife unconditionally and in good time (‘And in a few minutes’ time it will be four o’clock already!’), otherwise her threats would certainly be carried out, so, putting an end to the efforts of Valuska, who, having been confused by the preceding gabble, was trying to prove to him the groundlessness of his fears about the circus, he announced that, ‘conscious of a job well done’, he was off home now, but — and here he gave Valuska a significant look, one, however, that did not reveal the full extent of his plans — he would first ask him that whenever he finished whatever remained to do in Honvéd Passage he should return immediately. Naturally, Valuska protested that he couldn’t leave him alone in such cold weather, not to mention abandoning ‘the idea of seeing the whale’, so Eszter was forced to go into a little more detail, interrupting himself only to reassure Valuska that everything was perfectly all right and that he’d manage (‘Look, my friend,’ he said, ‘I cannot say I like the inexorable grip of frost, nor, on the other hand, that my existence here represents the tragedy of a tropical temperament condemned to spend eternity in the empire of snow, since as you know there is no snow, nor shall there be ever again, so let’s not even discuss it. Have no doubt, however, that I am capable of making my way back home over the little distance that remains unaided, even in this cold weather. And another thing,’ he added, ‘don’t spend too much time in regretting the brief postponement of the climax of our memorable adventure. I would happily have made the acquaintance of the majestic being, but we must give it up for the time being. It is, I find,’ he smiled at Valuska, ‘always pleasant and entertaining to come upon a creature on one of the points of the evolutionary scale at which I, personally, would gladly have stopped, but this walk has exhausted me and my rendezvous with your whale will, I imagine, wait till tomorrow … ’ His voice no longer had the sharpness it once had and he was aware that the intention of being witty was far more evident than the wit itself, but since there was a latent commitment in what he said, Valuska, albeit somewhat unhappily, accepted his proposition; so the rest of their way together Eszter remained undisturbed and free to plan the occasion of their next meeting. He came to the conclusion that thanks to Mrs Harrer’s destructive passion for cleanliness, apart from the barricading of the gates and the boarding up of the windows, there was little else needed to make the house habitable, and relieved by this thought he fell to speculating as to what ‘life à deux might be like’. With great care and precision he defined Valuska’s place in the magnetic swamp of his house in the space beside the drawing room, as close to his own as possible, and imagined ‘peaceful mornings spent together’ and ‘silent evenings full of harmony’. He could see them now, sitting together in deep tranquillity, brewing up coffee in the afternoons and preparing hot dinner at least twice a week; his friend would launch forth on his astronomical reveries and he would pass his usual deprecatory remarks, and in so doing they would forget the rubbish, the fading props of the world, the very world itself … He noticed (and the consciousness naturally somewhat embarrassed him) that having got so far with his plans he had begun to shed a few sentimental tears, so he quickly looked round again and, casting his mind back to his sufferings, concluded that in view of his weakened condition (‘Being an old man, as indeed I am’) such a show of emotion was, for once, quite forgivable. He took the ice-cold lunch-box from Valuska, made him swear that as soon as his business was finished he would come straight over, and, after a few other minor admonitions, somewhere in the region of Hétvezér Passage, watched him disappear from view.He lost him from view, yet did not lose him, because even though the houses came between them he could still see Eszter, his beloved master, whose one-hour-long excursion had, under Valuska’s intense protection, left such a strong mark on the town that no mass of mere buildings could obscure him. Everything pointed to the fact that he had passed that way, and wherever Valuska looked, the knowledge that he was still near conjured the other’s presence — so much so that after the actual parting he spent a few minutes in a kind of reverie as the effect of this extraordinary event began to fade, slowing the process down and enabling him mentally to escort his master back to the house in Wenckheim Avenue, when he could breathe again and be assured that the walk, Mr Eszter’s unexpected and wonderful foray into the world, ‘though not without its element of sadness’, had nevertheless been conducted to good effect. To have stood beside him as he left the room, to have been present as he took his first few steps in the hall, to have followed him like a shadow knowing what a tremendous advance this was in the much-desired and long-hoped-for healing process, to have watched him proceed from lounge to outside gate was cause for joy and conferred great honour on him as the proud witness of all this activity; on the other hand, simply to regard the excursion as something ‘not without its element of sadness’ now was to fail to convey the full quality of the experience, since his belated recognition of the fact that his elderly friend found every step an ordeal had, even during the walk, rather clouded the delight of being a ‘proud witness’, leaving only a suffocating air of sadness. He had believed that the moment the invalid had risen for the first time and finally left his curtained room heralded a recovery, a resurrection of his appetite for life, but within a few steps he had had to confront the possibility that the afternoon would bring no amelioration but only reveal the true seriousness of his condition, and the frightening likelihood that his public reappearance in the cause of social renewal was not the way back into the world but, more probably, a last farewell and resignation from it, an act of ultimate rejection, and this — for the first time in all their acquaintance — filled Valuska with the deepest anxiety. Feeling ill at the first breath of fresh air was a bad sign, though, since Eszter had hardly ventured from the house for as long as he could remember and certainly not in the last two months, it was not altogether unexpected, but nothing had prepared him to accept the extent of Eszter’s physical deterioration or the sad condition of the town itself, its nervous tension and exhaustion, and his own lack of vigilance left him with a terrible sense of guilt. Guilt for his lack of awareness, for having blinded himself to the truth and vainly hoped-for improvement in the short term; guilt because if any harm had come to his companion on this most trying walk he would have felt entirely to blame; and more than guilt, shame, confusion and the keenest mental torture, that instead of exhibiting a dignified and brilliant intellect to the town he could produce only a feeble old man whose best option, that of going straight back home, had been made unavailable by virtue of the promise he had made to Mrs Eszter. So they had had to go, and, unable to disguise his dependency, Mr Eszter had, without a word, taken him by the arm, and since this was a sign that his dependency was a form of delegation, Valuska had felt that if this was how things stood there was nothing for him to do but to try and divert his friend’s attention, and so he had begun to talk about the news he had been so happy to bring to his attention at two o’clock. He spoke about sunrise, he spoke about the town, about how each and every part of it had woken to a distinct and separate life as the light touched it at dawn, he had talked and kept talking but the words lacked conviction because he himself was hardly paying attention to them. He was forced to look on the world through his friend’s eyes, constantly to follow Eszter’s gaze and realize, ever more helplessly, that whatever his eyes lit on bore witness not to his own liberating convictions but to the latter’s sombre outlook. In the first moments he had believed that, freed from the close confines of his room, it would be the most natural thing for his friend to recover his strength and desire for life, that he might be persuaded to direct his attention ‘to the totality of things, not to specific details’, but by the time they reached the Komló it had become obvious that, once Eszter had laid eyes on them, these details could not be subsumed under ever more hollow-sounding words, so he had decided to keep quiet, his most valuable contribution to the trials and tribulations of their journey being to give support through honest acceptance and dumb assent. But this resolution had come to nothing, and when he left the hotel the words seemed to rush from his lips with, if such a thing were possible, even greater desperation, for standing in the food line he had heard some terrifying news that had thrown him into utter confusion. To be precise, it was not so much the terrifying news conveyed by people in the kitchen to the effect that ‘the crowd in the market square was in fact a criminal gang of vandals’ which, shortly after twelve o’clock, had robbed and would, like hooligans, have wrecked the entire drinks-dispensing facility of the Komló, for this he simply didn’t believe, discounting it as ‘fears produced by the imagination’, one of the depressingly common signs of ‘infectious terrors and anxieties’; what did, however, surprise him as he was carrying the filled lunch-box back to the waiting Eszter was something he had so far entirely failed to notice: the fact that the corridor and the forecourt and the pavement in front of the hotel were indeed covered in shards of broken flasks and bottles which people were forced to negotiate. He had felt confused and answered his companion’s perfectly understandable questions with a momentary show of hesitancy, quickly going on to talk about the whale, and later — the business with Mr Mádai having been successfully concluded — attempting to allay fears associated with the whale, fears that, to tell the truth, he himself now was prey to, for while he was certain that one sober gesture towards the heavens would ensure a rational return to life as he knew it, he was unable to forget what he had heard in the kitchen (particularly the head cook’s remark that, ‘Anyone wandering about the streets at night is risking his life!’). It was clearly a mistake to think that the ‘friendly obliging people’ with whom he had spent hours waiting in front of the circus vehicle that morning were vandals or bandits, but it was the kind of mistake, Valuska reflected, which, if only because the frightening rumours had spread so far, might leave even a man like Mr Nadabán shaking in his boots; it was therefore up to him to clear up this matter immediately, once and for all, and so, as in his imagination he was escorting Mr Eszter home, and had progressed from Városház Street to the market square, his first instinct on arriving in the midst of the still immobile waiting crowd was to pick out an individual and discuss the matter with him, the memory of the head cook’s irresponsible claim mingling and conflicting with his own more optimistic conviction (… one sober gesture … one cool intervention …). He informed the man what was being said about them, that people in town were wont to jump to conclusions; he told him about Mr Eszter’s condition, and stated his conviction that everyone should be acquainted with that great scholar; he confessed his own fears for him, proclaimed that he knew perfectly well where his duty lay, and finally begged to be excused his slight inarticulacy, but, he quickly added, he was already certain, even after these few minutes, that he was talking to a friendly spirit and that he was absolutely sure that his new friend understood him perfectly. The man he addressed made no reply to any of this but simply gave him a long hard stare from head to toe, then, perhaps noticing Valuska’s startled expression, smiled, slapped him on the back, pulled a bottle of cheap spirits from his pocket and offered it to him in amiable fashion. Relieved to see the relaxed