den end, and since the pedantic and impersonal level of enquiry to which he felt unequal was clearly no longer to be enforced, despite his anxiety he succeeded in concluding his account and clearing things up a little. He described the appearance of the director from the cigar through to the elegant fur coat and repeated his memorable words of farewell; he described the circumstances of the man’s departure and how this was received by the crowd; and, since he was convinced that the committee before him would interpret the foregoing events in this light, he admitted that, owing to the conditions in the market square and the town generally, he was quite at a loss what to do as far as Mr Eszter was concerned. If this outstanding scholar were to recover his health and retain his powers of creation, he needed, above all, conditions of absolute calm, calm, repeated Valuska, and not that ever more intense, and to him wholly incomprehensible, sense of agitation he had unavoidably (‘though I did everything I could to avoid it …!’) encountered this afternoon on finally leaving his house. Everyone knew that for a man blessed with such a high degree of sensitivity even the most insignificant signs of disorder were likely to be harmful and depressing, and because of this, Valuska confessed, especially because he had seen how the universal anxiety had communicated itself to the crowd in the market square, his every thought was for Mr Eszter. He understood perfectly that his own role and significance in the business in hand, compared to that of Mrs Eszter and the committee, amounted to little short of nothing, nevertheless he begged them to place their trust in him, to be assured that they could rely on him to do whatever they demanded of him. He would have liked to add that for him personally Mr Eszter’s good was of paramount importance, and, having got so far, to state how greatly he himself was reassured by the fact that the fate of the town (and therefore of his master) was in the hands of something as impressive as the committee he saw before him, but unfortunately he was unable to express either sentiment, for the woman silenced him with a single stern gesture, saying, ‘Very good, indeed you are perfectly right, we can’t sit round chattering, we must do something.’ They made him repeat what he was to do, and he, excitedly, like a child reciting his tables, went through all the salient points — which were to note ‘the size of the crowd … the atmosphere … and the appearance, should it appear, of a certain monster’; then, once they had given up the idea of explaining this last admonition and made him solemnly promise to be both thorough and quick, he promised to return in a matter of minutes and left the committee room on tiptoe lest he should wake the occupant of the bed, who, just at that moment, groaned in his sleep. Wholly immersing himself in the dignity of having been trusted by the committee, or rather in the sense of relief that an entire ‘crisis committee’ was supporting Mr Eszter through his trials and tribulations, he carried on tiptoeing through the courtyard and only remembered to assume his normal gait once he had reached the street and closed the rickety old gate behind him. He couldn’t positively state that the visit to Mrs Eszter was exactly reassuring but at least the woman’s decisiveness had exercised a healing power which drove away anxiety and uncertainty, and though he hadn’t received an answer to any of his questions, he felt that here, at last, was someone to whom he could safely entrust his affairs. Unlike the earlier situation, where he — the unworldly innocent — had to understand and decide things by himself, he was now entrusted with a single unambiguous task, to accomplish that which he had been asked to do, and this wouldn’t, after all, be so terribly difficult, he thought. He mentally ran through the various elements of that task — ten times at least — and, before long, felt lighter in his mind concerning the matter of the unspecified ‘monster’ (having worked out that he was supposed to be looking at the whale again); he felt lighter, and, remembering the calm gaze of the woman, felt the once-disturbing fog of confusion concerning his entire mission lifting at the same time, and so, when he practically collided with Mr Harrer at the entrance to the square, the latter having addressed him in passing (‘Everything will be all right now, but it would be much better if a young man like you were not hanging about in the street …!’), he simply smiled back and vanished into the multitude though he would have been all too happy to explain his presence (‘… no, you’re mistaken, Mr Harrer, this is precisely where I should be …!’). The square was now lit by hundreds of little fires, and here and there groups of twenty or thirty freezing bodies were warming themselves at the flames, which leapt higher and higher, and since this made it easier to pass through them and to see everything a little more clearly, it took Valuska only a few unobstructed minutes to take stock of the scene before him. A few minutes without obstruction perhaps, but this ‘thorough examination’ brought no immediate enlightenment as to the sheer size of the crowd (what detail was he supposed to look out for if everything was as before?) and observing these apparently peaceful groups loitering about the fires, rubbing their hands, he felt there was nothing particularly threatening here, not even in ‘the atmosphere’. ‘No one is moving, the mood seems fine,’ he tried the words out, but they rang ever more false, and as they did so, the nature of his mission appeared ever more painful. Observing these people in secret, walking among them as if he were some enemy, suspecting them of unnamed felonies and murders, taking their most innocent gestures as evidence of an evil intent — Valuska immediately realized that he was incapable of carrying this programme through. If, in his previous state of fright, he had found the woman’s sobering power a source of strength, then a few minutes among these people gathered around the friendly warmth of bonfires — resulting in a curious and sudden sense of domesticity — relieved him of the minor but embarrassing burden of misunderstanding, a misunderstanding shared by the head cook, Nadabán and his friends and Mrs Eszter herself, implying that the cure for ‘anxiety induced by a need for a rational explanation’ (and indeed his anxiety concerning Mr Eszter too) might be found in the circus and its long-suffering audience. The undoubtedly mysterious circus and the mysteriously loyal audience, the entire mystery, Valuska admitted to himself as the vision grew clearer, might have a simple and perfectly obvious explanation. He joined a group by one of the fires but the silence of his companions as they hung their heads staring at the flames or occasionally stole a glance in the direction of the circus wagon no longer perturbed him because he clearly understood that the mystery consisted of nothing but the whale, the first sight of the whale that he himself had seen and experienced that very morning. Was it so strange, he thought as he gazed about him with a smile on his face — and he would happily have hugged every single one of them in his relief — that everyone here had been as captivated as he was by the extraordinary creature? Was it any wonder that, deep down inside themselves, they believed it might be worth waiting on some extraordinary event in its proximity? He was so delighted to feel ‘the scales falling from his eyes’, he wanted to share the experience, and therefore declared in conspiratorial tones to those around him that he found ‘the endless wealth of nature’ overwhelming, quite overwhelming, he said, adding that such a sign, on a day like this, pointed to ‘the apparently lost unity of things’—then, not waiting for a reply, he waved goodbye to the others and continued on his way among the crowd. His first impulse was to rush back with the news, but according to his instructions he was to survey the whale too (‘The monster …!’ he smiled at the fearful epithet), and so, in order that his account to the committee should be as full as possible, he determined to steal another quick glance at ‘the Emissary of the One’ if he could, and not to leave his companions in the lurch this evening, an evening that had begun so badly but now promised to end so well. The wagon was open and they hadn’t yet put the boards across, so he couldn’t resist the possibility of stepping in rather than simply having a ‘quick peek’. Now that he was alone in looking at it, the body of the whale, illuminated by only two flickering light bulbs and resting as it did between enormous tin walls in the freezing cold outside, appeared bigger and more terrifying than ever, but he was no longer scared of it, in fact, apart from a respectful fascination, he felt as if the intervening events between their first encounter and the present one had facilitated a strange, confidential, almost courteous relationship between the two of them, and he was about to give it a humorous ticking off as he was leaving (‘See how much trouble you’ve caused, even though you’ve long been unable to harm anyone …’) when he heard unexpected if indistinct voices somewhere deep in the wagon. He thought he recognized the voices, and, as it soon turned out, he was not mistaken, for having reached the door at the back which, as he had earlier surmised, led to the area reserved for accommodation, by putting his ear to the tin wall he could begin to pick out a few sentences (‘… I engaged him to show himself, not to spin stupid stories. I won’t let him out. Turn him round! …) that were most certainly spoken by the director. The sounds he heard after that — a low even grumbling followed by a kind of sharp and sudden chirrup — were perfectly incomprehensible at first and it took some time for him to realize that the director was not conducting a monologue with caged birds and bears but was expressly addressing someone, that the strange grumblings and chirrupings must in fact have been produced by human beings, the first of which was even now grumbling in rather broken Hungarian to the effect that, ‘That’s what he says, and no one can stop him whatever they do. And he doesn’t understand what you are saying, Mr Director, sir …’ Having got so far, it was clear to Valuska that he had found himself in the position of uninvited witness (furthermore, one ever less capable of suppressing his curiosity) to a discussion or, more likely, argument, though what the subject of the argument was, or whom the director was addressing in that apparently tense atmosphere (Tell him,’ he was just saying, ‘I am not willing to risk the reputation of the company again. That last time was positively the last …’), was not quite clear, and even if he did succeed in distinguishing the new bout of grumbling from the concomitant chirruping, and interpreting the bit of vaguely Hungarian grumbling that followed (‘He says he doesn’t recognize a superior authority. And that the director couldn’t seriously think he would …’), he still couldn’t tell who was speaking or how many conspirators there were in that hidden room, at least not until the next snatch of conversation. ‘Would you please get it through into that infant’s thick skull,’ the director exclaimed, losing his temper — and being able to smell his cigar Valuska could picture the smoke snaking from his lips—‘that I will not let him out, and even if, God knows, I did let him out he couldn’t say a word. And you would not act as his interpreter. You are to remain here. I will take him out. Otherwise he’s fired. In fact you’re both fired.’ Recognizing the unmistakably threatening tone of that remark it suddenly dawned on Valuska not only that this grumbling and chirruping — which were once again succeeding each other in that order and which reminded him of nothing he had ever heard before — were linguistically related and that there must therefore be two other people in that, as he imagined, narrow if not altogether uncomfortable bedroom (the director’s person had radiated a likely need for comfort) beside the man with the sonorous and commanding voice, but that one of the two, the grumbler, must be the ticket collector with the squashed nose he had seen that morning. The very name he seemed to be stuck with, the ‘factotum’, made this all the more likely, and once he had decided this, one actor in this increasingly terrifying though enlightening conversation — which was clearly of an intimate or, so to speak, business nature — one particular member of this, as all the circumstances appeared to suggest, two-person company (something told Valuska that he had stumbled on the place where all his questions would be answered once the subject of the conversation was revealed, as it soon would be) became practically visible, and he could imagine him as clearly as if he were standing there, watching that enormous body behind the tin door as it calmly mediated between the two passionately opposing parties, between a strange and apparently inarticulate language and the language of the director. What that language was, who it was the factotum was acting as interpreter for — in other words, working out who the third person in that sealed domestic space was — lay, for now, beyond Valuska’s capabilities to discover, since neither the response (which in the giant’s grumbling translation came out as, ‘He says he’s wants me with him because he’s afraid the director might drop him’) nor the cigar smoker’s sharp interjection (‘Tell him I resent his impudence!’) was of any great help. Not only did it not help but it further confused him, since the suggestion that this so far unseen member of the whale’s entourage (not just unseen, but apparently, deliberately concealed) had to be carried (how, on one’s lap?), and that he had been hired as an exhibit which was not going to be put on exhibition, made the problem a particularly hard one to solve in any convincing way; furthermore, the imperious reaction (‘He says that is ridiculous, because it’s common knowledge he has a following out there. His followers will not forget who he is. No ordinary force can hold him, he has a magnetic power’) indicated ever more clearly that the awe-inspiring and apparently omnipotent director was in a very tight corner, faced as he was by a superior being. ‘Sheer insolence!’ the director cried, openly betraying his dependency and helplessness, and the ever more nervous witness behind the door felt a tremor pass through him, thinking that if nothing else then the terrifying power of this great booming voice must surely put an end to the argument. ‘His magnetic power,’ the voice rumbled mockingly, ‘is a disfigurement! He is an aberration, I’ll say it slowly so you can understand it, an ab-ber-ray-shun, who — and he knows this as well as I do — has no knowledge or power. The title of prince,’ the voice rang with contempt, ‘was one I bestowed on him as a business decision! Tell him that I invented him! And that out of the two of us, I alone have the faintest conception of the world about which he piles lie upon outrageous lie, whose mob he agitates!!’ ‘He says his public is out there waiting,’ came the answer, ‘and they are growing impatient. To them he is The Prince’. ‘All right,’ screamed the director, ‘he is fired!!!’ Though through this exchange, which — because of the mystery surrounding the actors and the subject of their argument — was frightening enough in itself, Valuska had all but turned to stone behind the tin partition, it was only now that terror really seized him. He felt that those imposing words from ‘aberration’ through to ‘agitates’, from ‘magnetic power’ through to ‘mob’, were sweeping him towards some ominous shore where everything he had failed to understand these last few hours, in fact every apparently meaningless phenomenon of the last few months, would suddenly resolve itself into a single picture with one dreadful outline, putting an end to ignorant certainties (such as the belief that the broken glass on the floors of the Komló, the friendly hand that seemed to manacle him in its grip, the anxious conference in Honvéd Square, and the patient waiting of the crowd in the market square had, and could have, nothing to do with each other), and that because of these ‘imposing words’ the blurred image created in his mind by the sum of his c