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 confused impressions and experiences had, like a landscape from which the fog had started to lift, begun the irreversible process of clearing, thereby suggesting the possibility that all these phenomena were symptoms of, or pointed to, a single event that meant ‘big trouble’. At this stage of hostilities it was too early to say what precisely that might be, but he suspected that even if he were to offer resistance, he would know soon enough; and he did resist it as though it were possible to place obstacles in its path, and defended himself as if this offered some hope of avoiding it, of suppressing the instinct which up till now had detected no obvious connection between the crowds that had arrived together with the circus and the local people’s hysterical sense of foreboding. That hope, however, was growing fainter by the minute, for the director’s furious outburst had drawn together the various strands of his experience so far, from the head cook’s words to the depressing conviction of Nadabán and his friends, from the memorable unrest of the crowd stiff with cold to the possibilities suggested by the so-called ‘monster’, and this consonance suggested something terrifying, if only because he was forced to admit that when he had dismissed, and indeed smiled at, local people’s apprehensions, apprehensions that seemed to have grown particularly acute in the last twenty-four hours, they were right and he was wrong. From the moment the thought had first occurred to him during the murmur of protest following the director’s notable public address, Valuska had successfully avoided drawing the appropriate conclusions and had dismissed any possibility that all the available facts supported the dark forebodings of the locals; through the time in Honvéd Square when he recognized that somewhere at the back of his own anxieties about Mr Eszter there lurked the suspicion that the general apprehension ‘had taken hold of him too on the way’, down to the present moment when he had lost even the capacity to move away from the door, he was forced to recognize that the relaxation of tension that used to follow waves of fear would not now occur, that the shadow of significance that underlay these phenomena ultimately was their true significance, that there would, in short, be no escape from the feeling of inevitability about what was happening here. ‘Fine, he says,’ so the battle beyond the door continued. ‘He’ll go freelance from now. He will part company from the director and take no further interest in the whale. And he’s taking me with him.’ ‘You?!’ ‘I’ll go,’ answered the factotum indifferently, ‘when he says so. He means money. The director is poor. To the director The Prince means money.’ ‘Don’t you give me that Prince stuff too!’ the director turned on the interpreter, then, after a moment, he added: ‘Tell him I don’t like arguing. I’ll let him out on one small condition. That he keeps his mouth shut. Not a word. He is to be as silent as the grave.’ The weary tone of that voice, the early thunder of which had been reduced to a groan of resignation, left him in no doubt that the director had suffered a defeat, and since Valuska knew the cause in which he had been defeated and understood that there was something about the maker of that chirruping sound that the out-manoeuvred master was wanting, at all costs, to frustrate, something that would now inevitably follow with an instant and blinding clarity, he felt very much like a cat stuck in the middle of the road, paralysed by the headlights of an onrushing vehicle: he couldn’t move a muscle but stared, numb and helpless, at the inner door of the freezing truck. ‘He says,’ the voice of the interpreter continued, ‘there will be no conditions. The director gets the money, The Prince gets his followers. Everything has a price. There’s no point in arguing.’ ‘If his rabble destroy the towns they pass through,’ the director argued, exhausted, ‘there will be nowhere left for him to go after a while. Translate that.’ ‘He says,’ came the immediate answer, ‘that he has no wish to go anywhere at any time. It is always the director who carries him. And, he says, he doesn’t understand what you mean “after a while”. There’s no time left even now. Unlike the director, he believes that everything has its own individual significance. The significance is in the elements not in the whole as the director imagines.’ ‘I don’t imagine anything,’ the director answered after a long silence. ‘What I do know is that if he rouses the crowd rather than calming it, they will tear this town to pieces.’ ‘A town built on lies will continue to be a town built on lies,’ the factotum spoke for the more agitated chirruping. ‘What they do and what they will do are both based on lies and false pride. What they think and what they will think are equally ridiculous. They think because they are frightened. Fear is ignorance. He says he likes it when things fall to pieces. Ruin comprises every form of making: lies and false pride are like oxygen in the ice. Making is half: ruin is everything. The director is frightened and doesn’t understand: his followers are not frightened and do understand.’ ‘Please inform him,’ the director snapped back, ‘that as far as I am concerned his prophecies are mere blather, he can sell them to the mob but not to me. And tell him, while you’re at it, that I refuse to listen to him any longer, that I will have nothing more to do with him, will take no responsibility for his actions, and that from this moment, gentlemen, you are free to do as you please … If you ask me though,’ he added, clearing his throat for emphasis, ‘you would do better to tuck your princeling up in bed, give him a double dose of cream, then take your books out and learn to speak Hungarian properly.’ ‘The Prince is shouting,’ the factotum remarked indifferently above the now continuous, almost hysterical chirruping, not even bothering to address his boss directly. ‘He says, he is always free in himself. His position is between things. And in between things he sees that he is himself the sum of things. And what things add up to is ruin, nothing but ruin. To his followers he is “The Prince” but in his own view he is the prince of princes. Only he can see the whole, he says, because he can see there is no whole. And for The Prince this is how things must be … as they must always be … he must see with his own eyes. His followers will wreak havoc because they understand his vision perfectly. His followers understand that all things are false pride, but don’t know why. The Prince knows: it is because the whole does not exist. The director cannot grasp this, the director is in his way. The Prince is bored with him; he is going out.’ The passionate chirruping ceased along with the bear-like grumbling, nor did the director have anything more to say, but even if he had Valuska wouldn’t have heard it, because ever since those last words died away he had been backing away, much as his ears were — metaphorically — backing away from the words, in fact he backed away so far that he bumped into the propped-up snout of the whale. Then somehow everything around him was in motion: the truck slipped from under him, people were running beside him, and this great sense of rushing stopped only when he realized, in the middle of the crowd, that his new friend — to whom he wanted to reveal that what they were going to be asked to undertake was dreadful and that the words they were waiting to hear, even if they were what they had been waiting for all this time, should under no circumstances be listened to — was nowhere to be found. Was nowhere to be found because the immense burden of his discovery had suddenly descended on him, crushing and destroying in minutes every idea he had formed about the circus, the afternoon and everything else that had happened to him that day, because his head was spinning, his shoulders were aching and he was cold and could no longer see faces but merely the blurred shapes of bodies. He ran between the bonfires but, being racked with cramps, his words (‘deception’ … ‘evil’ … ‘shame’) came out in such a breathless and choking manner as to be practically incomprehensib