re only of an emerging sense of agonizing bitterness: for while she felt it was deeply unfair that she should be cast as an innocent victim rather than an untroubled survivor, she who ‘all her life had longed for peace, and never harmed a soul’, she was forced to concede that this was of little consequence: there was no authority to which she could appeal, no one to whom she might protest, and she could hardly hope that the forces of anarchy having once been loosed could afterwards be restrained. After so much gossip, so much terrifying rumour-mongering, she could now see for herself that ‘it was all going down the drain’, for she understood that while her own particular immediate danger was over, in ‘a world where such things happen’ the collapse into anarchy would inevitably follow. Outside she could already hear the impatient grumbling of passengers preparing to get off and the train was noticeably slowing down; realizing, panic-stricken, that she had left her fur coat wholly unguarded, she hastily unbolted the door, stepped out into the press of people (who, ignoring the fact that there was no point in it, engaged in the same storming of doors on the way out as they had on the way in) and, stumbling across suitcases and shopping bags, struggled back to her seat. The coat was still there but she didn’t immediately see the fake-fur wrap and while conducting a furious search and trying desperately to remember whether she had taken it with her into the washroom it suddenly dawned on her that in all that nervous excitement her assailant was nowhere to be seen: obviously, she thought, much assured, he must have been one of the first to leave the carriage. At this moment the train actually stopped but the briefly less stuffy, partially vacated, carriage was almost immediately overrun by an even larger, and, if possible, more frightening mass of bodies, more frightening because silent, and while it was easy to see that this dark huddle would give rise to equal anxiety over the remaining twenty kilometres, there was a still greater shock in store for her: if she had hoped to be rid of the unshaven man she was to be bitterly disappointed. Having gathered up her coat and finally located her wrap under the worn and shining seat, she gathered it about her shoulders and had, just for safety’s sake, set out to find another carriage in which to continue her journey, when — she could hardly believe her eyes — there was the very same broadcloth coat (‘As if he had left it there expressly for me to see!’) thrown carelessly across the back of a distant seat. She stoppped dead in her tracks, then hurried on, through the back door into the next carriage where she pushed her way through another silent mass of people to find another central rear-facing seat which, in desperation, she immediately occupied. For some time she kept her eyes fixed on the door, ready to leap up, though she no longer knew of whom she was most frightened, nor from what direction the danger was most likely to threaten, then, nothing untoward having happened (what with the train still standing in the station), she tried to gather her remaining strength so that should some awful adventure befall her she would at least be ready. Suddenly she felt infinitely tired, but though her weak legs were practically burning in the lining of her boots and her aching shoulders felt ‘ready to collapse’ she was unable to relax even a little, or only to the extent of slowly turning her head about to relieve the pain in her neck and reaching for her compact to cool her tearful flushed face. ‘It’s over, over, there’s nothing to be scared of now,’ she kept muttering to herself without believing it: for not only did she lack any such confidence, but she was unable even to lean back in her seat for greater comfort without increasing, as she thought, the risk of leaving herself unprepared. For the carriage was being occupied by a crowd ‘every bit as ugly as the first lot’ and not a whit less frightening than that at the start of her journey, so she could only hope that the three empty seats around her — the last empty seats — might act as some kind of defence and remain unoccupied. There was indeed some chance of that, at least for a while, because, for practically a whole minute (the train whistle blew twice in the interval), not a single new passenger entered the carriage; but suddenly, at the head of a new wave, loudly puffing and panting and carrying an enormous backpack and basket, balanced by a few well-filled shopping bags, a fat headscarved peasant woman appeared in the doorway, and turning her head this way and that way (‘Like a hen …’ it occurred to Mrs Plauf), took a decisive step towards her and, grunting and croaking with an aggression that brooked no argument, proceeded to colonize all three seats with her endless baggage which formed a barricade for her as well as Mrs Plauf from the throng of contemptible (or so her expression suggested) travellers behind her. It would have been useless of course for Mrs Plauf herself to have muttered a word of complaint and, suppressing her fury, she came round to thinking how it might even have been a stroke of good luck that, having lost the comforting cushion of space around her, she was at least preserved from the encroachments of the silent mob, but this feeling of consolation was short-lived, for her unwelcome fellow traveller (all she wanted was to be left in peace) loosened the knot binding her headscarf under her chin and, without a moment’s hesitation, launched into conversation. ‘At least the place is heated, eh?’ The sound of that raven-like croaking and the sight of two piercing malicious eyes that seemed to leap at her from beneath the headscarf decided her immediately that, since she could neither repel nor escape her, the only course of action was to ignore her entirely and she turned her head away to look out of the window in protest. But the woman, having cast a few more contemptuous looks down the carriage, was not bothered in the slightest. ‘You don’t mind me talking to you? There’s just the two of us so we might as well have a good natter, eh? Going far? Right to the end of the line, me. Visiting my lad.’ Mrs Plauf glanced at her reluctantly, but seeing that the more she ignored her the worse things would get, nodded in acknowledgement. ‘Because,’ the woman perked up at the encouragement, ‘it’s the grandson’s birthday. He said to me, at Easter, he did, sweet little bairn, ‘cause I was there then: You’re coming, mam, aren’t you? That’s what he calls me, mam, that’s his name for me, the little lad. So that’s where I’m off to now.’ Mrs Plauf felt constrained to smile here but immediately regretted it because this opened the floodgates: there was no stopping the woman now. ‘If that little bairn only knew what a hard life it is for us old folk nowadays …! Spend the whole day standing about in the market on your poor feet, and what with the varicose veins and all, no wonder a body gets tired by the end of the day. Because, you know, to tell you the truth, we do have a little garden, but the pension hardly stretches. I don’t know where all those shiny Mercedes come from, all that money people seem to have, I honestly don’t. But you listen here, I’ll tell you something. It’s thieving is what it is, thieving and cheating! It’s a Godless crooked world, God has no say in it any more. And this awful weather, eh? You tell me what it’s all coming to. It’s all round you, isn’t it? Radio says it’ll be seventeen degrees or whatever — below freezing, that is! And we’re only at the end of November. You want to know what’ll happen? I’ll tell you. We’ll freeze till spring. That’s right. ‘Cause there’s no coal. I wish I knew why we had all those no-good miners up in the hills. Do you know? There, you see.’ Mrs Plauf’s head was swimming in the verbal downpour but however hard it was to bear she found it impossible to interrupt her, to make her shut up, and eventually, realizing the woman wasn’t really expecting her to listen and that she could get away with nodding every so often, she spent more and more time looking out of the window at lights slowly drifting by, attempting to bring some order to her troubled thoughts while the train drew away from the county capital, though hard as she tried she couldn’t banish the memory of the carelessly discarded coat which bothered her even more than did the frightening ill-omened crowd of silent faces that confronted her. ‘Was he disturbed?’ she fretted. ‘Did drink get the better of him? Or has he deliberately …’ She made up her mind not to torture herself with vain surmise, but, however risky the enterprise appeared, to ascertain whether the coat was still there, so, wholly ignoring the lumpen woman, she joined those loitering at the end of the carriage, crossed over the coupling and peered as carefully as she could through the gap of the door which had been left partly open. Her intuition that it would be better to investigate the unshaven man’s unexpected disappearance was immediately rewarded, for there, to her horror, he was, sitting with his back to her, his head just tipped back to swig at the bottle of brandy. Lest he, or anyone else among that dumb crew, should notice her (for in that event God himself could hardly absolve her of bringing her troubles on herself), still holding her breath, Mrs Plauf returned to the rear carriage, and was dumbfounded to see that a fur-hatted figure had taken advantage of her brief absence to occupy her seat practically unopposed, so that she, the only lady present, would have to travel standing, pressed against the side of the carriage, and she realized she had been rather stupid in deluding herself that, simply because she hadn’t seen him for a few minutes, she had been freed of the man in the broadcloth coat. Whether he had gone to the lavatory or popped out to the platform (‘Surely not without his coat?!’) to get himself another bottle of stinking spirits was completely immaterial now as she was not really worried that he would try to get at her again here on the train, since the crowd — provided it didn’t turn against her (‘A fur coat, a boa or my handbag might be enough for these people …!’) — and the difficulty of making one’s way across it, did, after all, offer some kind of defence; at the same time her mistake forced her to admit, since she might as well face the worst that could befall her, that in the case of some beastly mishap (‘… some incomprehensible, mysterious act of fate’) she would be firmly trapped and that this time there would be no escape. Next to her helplessness this was what most terrified her, since with the passing of immediate danger, the greatest threat, on reflection, was not so much that he would want to rape her (though ‘just to pronounce the word is awful …’) but that he looked to be the sort of creature who ‘knew neither God nor man’, who, in other words, had no fear of hellfire, and was therefore capable of anything (‘Anything!’). Once more she could see before her those ice-cold eyes, that bestial unshaven face, once again she saw his sinister and intimate wink, once more heard that flat, mocking voice saying: ‘It’s me’, and she was sure that she was not dealing with a simple sex maniac but had in fact escaped some vast murderous fury whose nature it was to crush under its heel whatever remained whole, for the very concepts of order, peace or the future were to such a monster inimical. ‘On the other hand,’ she could hear the hoarse voice of the old baggage who was now directing her never-ending stream of conversation at her new neighbour, ‘you look in a pretty bad way if you don’t mind me saying so. I got nothing to complain of, you see. Just the usual troubles of old age. And the teeth. Look,’ and shoving her head forward she opened her mouth wide for her fur-capped neighbour’s examination, drawing her cracked lips apart with her forefinger, ‘time’s ravages, all gone. But I don’t let them mess about in there! The doctor can waffle on as much as he likes! This lot’ll get me to the cemetery, eh? They’re not going to get rich on me, all these scoundrels, may their innards drop out, the lot of them! ‘Cause you look here,’ and from one of her shopping bags she drew forth a little plastic soldier; ‘what do you think this cost me, this little bit of rubbish! Believe it or not they wanted thirty-one forints for it! For this piece of trash! And what’s it got for that price? A gun and this red star. They have a real cheek asking thirty-one forints for that! Ah, but,’ she stuffed it back into her bag, ‘that’s all children want nowadays. So what can an old girl like me do? Buy it. You grind your teeth but you buy it! That’s right, eh?’ Mrs Plauf turned her head away with loathing and took a quick look out of the window, and then, hearing a dull thump, her glance darted back at them and she found herself unable to look away or stir an inch. She didn’t know whether it was a bare knuckle that had done the damage, since the unchanging silence failed to reveal what had happened or why, all she saw in that quick involuntary movement of her eye was the woman falling backwards … her head slipping to one side … her body, supported by her luggage, remaining more or less where it was, while the fur-capped man opposite (‘the usurper of her seat’) moved from his forward-leaning position, his face expressionless, and slowly sat back. Even when it is only some annoying fly being swatted you expect some general murmur, but no one stirred in response to this, not a word was spoken, everyone continued standing or sitting in perfect indifference. ‘Is it silent approval? Or am I imagining things again?’—Mrs Plauf stared in front of her, but she immediately rejected the possibility she had been dreaming, because judging by all she had seen and heard, she couldn’t but believe that the man had hit the woman. He must have had enough of her nattering and simply, without a word, struck her a blow in the face, and no, her heart thumped, no, it can’t have been otherwise, and in the meantime all this of course was so shocking that she could only stand rooted to the spot, her brow breaking out in perspiration at the fear of it. That woman is slumped there unconscious, the sweat poured down her brow, the man in the fur cap is motionless, and so she stood helplessly, seeing only the window before her, the window-frame and her own reflection in the dirty glass, then the train, which had been forced to stall for a few more minutes, started up again and, exhausted by the furious succession of images, her mind buzzing, she watched the dark empty landscape swimming by outside under the heavy sky in which, even in the moonlight, the masses of cloud were barely distinguishable. But neither the sky nor the landscape meant anything to her and she only realized she had practically arrived when the train clattered over the level-crossing over the main road leading into town, and she stepped out into the corridor, stood before the door and, bending to the shadow cast by her hand, saw the local industrial warehouses and the clumsy water-tower looming above them. Ever since her childhood, such things — level-crossings on highways, long flat buildings steaming in unbearable heat — were the first assuring reminders that she had arrived home still in one piece, and although this time she had particular cause for relief, since they would bring to an end circumstances of no ordinary hardship, and could almost feel the wild drumming in her heart that used to start up whenever she returned from her infrequent visits to relatives, or from the county capital where, once or twice a year, she attended the performance of some favourite operetta together with some members of her dispersed family, when the friendly warmth of the town served as a natural bastion protecting her home, now, and indeed for the last two or three months, but particularly now, after the shameful revelation that the world was full of people with unshaven faces and broadcloth overcoats, nothing of that sense of intimacy remained but a cold maze of empty streets where not only the faces behind the windows but the windows themselves stared blindly out at her and the silence was ‘broken only by the sharp yelp of bickering dogs’. She watched the approaching lights of town and once the train had passed the industrial estate with its car park and was making its way along the row of poplars lining the track which was only just