discernible in the darkness, she anxiously scanned the as-yet-pale and distant glow of streetlamps and illuminated houses to locate the three-storey block containing her apartment — anxiously, for the feeling of acute relief on realizing that she was home at last was immediately succeeded by terror, because she knew all too well that the train being now almost two hours late she couldn’t count on the usual evening bus service, and so would have to walk (‘And, what is more, alone …’) all the way home from the station — and, even before confronting that issue, there still remained the problem of actually getting off the train. Small allotments with kitchen gardens and locked sheds sped by beneath the window, followed by the bridge over the frozen canal and the old mill behind it; but they conveyed no sense of release, suggesting rather further, fearful stations of her cross, because Mrs Plauf was almost crushed by the knowledge that while she was only a few steps from freedom, suddenly there, behind her back, at any moment, some wholly incomprehensible something might leap out and attack her. Her whole body was covered in sweat. Hopelessly she observed the extended yard of the sawmill with its piles of logs, the tumbledown railwayman’s hut, the old steam engine slumbering in the sidings and the weak light percolating through the barred glass walls of the repair sheds. There was still no movement behind her, she was still standing by herself in the corridor. She gripped the ice-cold handle of the door but couldn’t decide: if she opened it too early someone might push her out, if too late then ‘that inhuman band of murderers’ might catch up with her. The train slowed alongside an infinitely long row of stationary wagons, and squealed to a halt. As the door opened, she practically leapt off, saw the sharp stones between the sleepers, heard her pursuers behind her, and quickly found herself outside in the station forecourt. No one attacked her but by some ill-chance which coincided with her arrival the lights in the vicinity suddenly went out, as did, so it soon transpired, every other light in town. Looking neither left nor right but keeping her eyes firmly at her feet so she shouldn’t stumble in the dark, she hurried over to the bus-stop hoping against hope that the bus might have waited for the train to come in, or that she might still catch the night-service, should there be one. But there was not a single vehicle waiting, nor could she count on the ‘night-service’ since, according to the timetable hanging beside the main entrance to the station, the last bus was precisely the one that would have left soon after the scheduled arrival of the train, and in any case the whole sheet was ruled through with two thick lines. Her attempts to forestall the others were all in vain, for while she stood perusing the timetable, the forecourt had become a dense forest of fur caps, greasy peasant hats and ear-flaps, and, as she was gathering courage to set out on her own, she was assailed by the terrible question of what all these people were doing here anyway; and the feeling she had almost forgotten, the awful memory of which had been practically washed away by other feelings in the rear of the compartment, now stabbed at her again as she saw, among the crowd loitering to the left of her, on the far side, the man in the broadcloth coat; it was as if he were searching about, looking for something, then he turned on his heels and was gone. This all happened so quickly, and he was so far away from her (to say nothing of the fact that it was dark and it had become almost impossible to distinguish the genuine from monsters of the imagination), that she couldn’t be absolutely certain it was really him, but the mere possibility so scared her that she cut through the idle ominous mass of bodies and, almost at a run, set off down the wide main road leading home. As it happened she wasn’t altogether surprised, for however unreal this seemed (hadn’t her whole journey been utterly unreal?!) even on the train, when to her great disappointment she spotted him a second time, something inside her had whispered that her involvement with the unshaven man — and the terrifying ordeal of the attempted rape — was far from over, and that now, when she had not only the fear of ‘bandits attacking her from behind’ to drive her forward but the prospect of him (‘If it really was him, and the whole thing wasn’t just imagination’) leaping out at her from some doorway, her feet stumbled on as if unable to decide whether it was more advisable in such a tight spot to retreat or run ahead. She had long left behind the enigmatic square of the station forecourt, had passed the junction with Zöldág Road which led to the pediatric hospital, but not a soul did she encounter (meeting someone she knew might be her salvation) below the bare wild chestnut trees of the unswervingly straight avenue, and beside the sound of her own breath, the light squeak of her footsteps and the humming of the wind in her face she heard nothing, only the steady quiet puffing of what might have been some distant, unrecognizable machine whose sound vaguely reminded her of an ancient sawmill. Although she continued to resist the force of circumstances which seemed to have been created expressly to challenge such resolution, in the complete absence of streetlight and the still oppressive silence she began to feel ever more like a victim cast to her fate, for wherever she looked, seeking the filtered lights of apartments, the place assumed the look of all cities under siege, where, regarding all further effort as pointless and superfluous, the inhabitants have surrendered even the last traces of endangered human presence in the belief that while the streets and squares have been lost, the thick walls of buildings behind which they cower afford shelter from any serious harm. She trod the uneven surface of rubbish frozen to the pavements and had just passed the minimal display of the ortopéd shop, a once popular showroom of the local shoe-manufacturing cooperative, when, before crossing over the next junction, more out of habit than anything else (owing to the petrol shortage there hadn’t been much traffic even when she’d set out to visit her relatives), she took a glance down the darkness of Erdélyi Sándor Road which, because the closed precincts of the law courts and the jail with their high, barbed-wire-topped walls running the length of it, was known by the locals simply as ‘Judgement Street’. Down in its depths, around the artesian well, she glimpsed a clotted mass of shadows, a dumb group, who, it suddenly seemed to her, were silently beating someone. In her fright she immediately took to her heels, every now and then casting a look behind her, and only slackened her pace once she knew that the law courts were far behind and that no one had emerged to pursue her. No one had emerged and no one was following her, nothing disturbed the deathly calm of the necropolis, except the increasingly loud puffing, and in the terrifying ripeness of that silence, to which the unbroken quiet round the artesian well, where some crime, for what else could it be, was being committed, raised an echo (not a single cry for help, not the single smack of a blow), it no longer seemed strange that there should be so few stragglers about, though despite the almost quarantine-like isolation of individuals in ordinary circumstances, she should by now have met one or two nighthawks like herself in a thoroughfare as broad and long as Baron Béla Wenckheim Avenue, especially so close to the city centre. Driven by her sense of foreboding, she hurried on, feeling ever more convinced that she was crossing some nightmare terrain permeated by evil, then, as she got ever closer to the source of that now clearly audible puffing, and through the bars of the wild chestnut trees could see the heap of machinery which produced it, she felt quite certain that, exhausted as she was by her struggles against the powers of terror, she was imagining, simply imagining everything, for what she saw in that first glance seemed not only stupefying but downright impossible. Not far from her, a spectral contraption was moving at melancholy pace through the winter night down the middle of the road — that is if this satanic conveyance, whose desperately slow crawl reminded her of a steamroller struggling to gain each centimetre of ground, could be said to be moving at alclass="underline" it wasn’t even a matter of overcoming strong wind resistance on the normal road surface, but of ploughing through a tract of dense, refractory clay. Sheathed in blue corrugated iron and sealed on every side, the lorry, which reminded her of an enormous wagon, was covered with bright yellow writing (an indecipherable dark-brown shape hovered at the centre of the inscriptions) and was much higher and longer — she noted incredulously — than those vast Turkish trucks that used to pass through town, and the whole shapeless hulk, which smelled vaguely of fish, was being drawn by a smoking, oily and wholly antediluvian wreck of a tractor which was making fearful exertions in the process. Once she caught up with it though, her curiosity overcame her fear and she paced along beside the vehicle for a while, peering at the clumsy foreign letters — obviously the work of an inexpert hand — but even up close their meaning remained inscrutable (could it be Slavic … or Turkish? …), and it was impossible to say what purpose the thing served, or indeed what it was doing here at all in the very heart of this frosty, windswept and deserted town — or even how it had managed to get here since, if this was its normal speed, it would have taken years for it to have made it from the nearest village, and it was hard to imagine (though there seemed no alternative) that it would have been brought in by rail. She lengthened her stride again and it was only once she had left the awesome juggernaut behind and glanced back that she spotted a heavily built and bewhiskered man with an indifferent expression on his face, wearing only a vest on top, with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, who — once he noticed her on the pavement — pulled a face and slowly raised his right hand from the wheel as if to greet the gaping figure outside. All this was highly unusual (to crown it all, it must have been rather overheated in the cabin for the mountain of flesh behind the wheel to feel so warm), and the more she kept glancing back at the vehicle as she moved away, the more exotic a monster did it seem, encapsulating in its appearance all that life had so recently thrown at her: the past, it seemed to say, was no longer what it had been but was crawling remorselessly ahead below the windows of unsuspecting people. From this moment she was convinced she was in the grip of a terrible nightmare, only there was no waking from this one: no, she was quite certain that it was reality, only more so; furthermore she realized that the chilling events in which she had been participant or to which she had been witness (the appearance of the phantasmagorical vehicle, the violence in Erdélyi Sándor Road, the lights going off with all the precision of an explosive device, the inhuman rabble in the station forecourt, and above all this, dominating everything, the cold unremitting stare of the figure in the broadcloth coat) were not merely the oppressive creations of her ever-troubled imagination, but part of a scheme so co-ordinated, so precise, that there could be no doubt of their purpose. At the same time she was constrained to make every effort to reject such an extraordinary fantasy, and she kept hoping that there might be some clear, however depressing, explanation for the mob, the weird truck, the outbreak of fighting, or, if for nothing else, for the extraordinary power cut that affected everything; all this she hoped because she couldn’t quite allow herself to lapse into a wholesale acceptance of a state of affairs so irrational as to permit the general security of the town to go down the drain together with every other sign of order. Sadly she had to forgo even this slim hope: for while the issue of the blacked-out streetlamps remained unresolved, the destination of the truck with its terrible load, and the nature of that load, were not to remain a mystery for long. She had passed the house of the local celebrity, György Eszter, had left behind the night noises of the park surrounding the old Wooden Theatre and had reached the tiny Evangelical Church when her glance happened to light on a round advertising pillar: she stopped dead in her tracks, stepped closer, then simply stood, and, in case she had made a mistake, read and reread the text which looked like the kind of thing a tramp from some outlying estate might scrawl, though a single perusal should have been enough since the poster, which had obviously been freshly pasted over all the others and still showed traces of fresh paste at the edges, offered an explanation of sorts. She thought that if she could finally isolate one distinct element of the chaos, she would find it easier to orientate herself and so (‘God forbid it should be necessary …!’ of course) defend herself ‘in case of a total collapse’, though the feeble light shed on this by the text only increased her anxiety, the problem all along having been that nothing seemed to provide the faintest shadow of an explanation for the whole cycle of events she had been forced to witness as victim or bystander, till now — as if that ‘feeble light’ (‘The Biggest Whale in the World, and other sensational secrets of nature’) were all too much at once — when she was driven to speculate whether there might not be some firm, yet incomprehensible reason at work in this. Because, well, a circus? Here?! When the end of the world was all too imminent? Fancy allowing such a nightmare menagerie, to say nothing of that evil-smelling beast, into the town! When the place is threatening enough as it is! Who has time for entertainments now, when we’re in a state of anarchy? What an idiotic joke! What a ridiculous, cruel idea! … Or could it be … could it mean precisely that … that it was all over and it didn’t matter any more? That someone was ‘fiddling while Rome burned’?! She hurried away from the pillar and crossed the road. There was a row of two-storey houses on that side, some with a faint light sifting through their windows. She gripped her handbag firmly and leaned into the wind. Reaching the last doorway, she took a