nd his own depressed state of mind — learned only much later, because for the time being, when he started to examine the mysterious circumstances he seemed to be faced with as best he could, all he could discover was that beside the chair in the middle of the bare hall, which served not only as the seat of the man who appeared to want to remain in the background while having overall charge of interrogations and possibly of all military operations, there was also an enormous gilt-framed picture that practically covered the dark-green hangings of the notable hall, showing a battle appropriate to the historical dignity of the place. This was all, and no more, that he could make note of in that first minute, and even these impressions appeared as uncertain hypotheses rather than facts, though any further questions regarding this particular leader of the army of liberation, questions regarding the exclusion of light, for instance (‘Possibly reasons of security …?’), like why, if they drew the curtains, did they not switch on the two chandeliers that dangled from the ceiling, or what the lieutenant-colonel in the chair, with his back to people but facing the historical scene in the painting, was actually doing in this darkened temporary HQ, did not lie in his immediate power to answer, if only because at that point Harrer sneaked over to him from the far corner, sat down in the recently occupied chair, and, now that the lieutenant had returned, acted as if he were interested only in the newly commenced interrogation of Eszter’s ex-neighbour, never taking his eyes off them, but cleared his throat and tried to tell him that he had moved closer only so that he might succeed in informing him of something that all his winks and hand gestures had failed to convey earlier. ‘Everything is all right with him — you know who I mean,’ Harrer whispered, eyes still fixed on the lieutenant; everyone’s attention, including the three men watching beside him, as well as the officer himself, was fully focused on events in the centre of the room. ‘But not a word, professor! You know nothing! If they ask you tell them you have seen neither hide nor hair of him since yesterday! You understand?’ ‘No,’ Eszter looked up at him. ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘Don’t turn to me!’ Harrer warned him, hardly able to disguise his anxiety that he might have to name the individual concerned, and repeated as if explaining the matter to a child: ‘Him! I found him at the station, I told him which direction to take in order to escape, he should be miles away by now, all you have to do is deny everything if asked!’ he gabbled, and when, glancing up at Volent, he noticed that the rest seemed to be aware of the whispering, he added simply, ‘Everything!’ Eszter stared uncomprehendingly before him (‘What’s there to deny …? What … him?’), then, suddenly, a hot flush shot through him, his head snapped to attention and, not giving a fig for Harrer’s firm injunction but suppressing an outright cry, he burst out, loudly enough for every eye to be turned on him, ‘Is he alive?!’ The other grinned confusedly under the lieutenant’s furious gaze, and spread his arms apologetically as if to shift the responsibility, intending to imply that he could not be held responsible for what the man sitting next to him cared to do, but the increasingly desperate smile he presented to the officer only made the latter more angry, and it even seemed likely that he would not let the matter rest there, so Harrer thought it advisable to get up immediately and, in order not to disturb the interrogation with the sound of his shoes, to tiptoe carefully back into his corner behind Mrs Eszter, who never once took her eyes off her husband. Eszter would have loved to follow him, but when he leapt up to do so, the lieutenant barked at him (‘Silence!’), so he was compelled to sit down again and — having thought through the matter at lightning speed — quickly realized that there was no point in throwing questions at Harrer, since he would only repeat what he had already said in that roundabout way of his. He didn’t need to hear it again, it was as clear as day now what was meant by ‘Him’, the ‘station’ and by the expression he was ‘miles away by now’, but the fear of disappointment warned him to remain calm and not to allow the meaning of the words to enter directly into his consciousness; he sipped at them, carefully, and concluded that he should investigate the reliability of the information as thoroughly as he could, but then the news broke through the shaky barriers of his scepticism and more or less swept all his fears away, so he abandoned all thought of investigating the truth of Harrer’s story. Because what he had heard brought Mrs Harrer’s account to mind and in that moment he knew that the story must be true in every detail; the present report validated what he had heard at dawn and that, in turn, validated the present without a shadow of doubt as far as he was concerned, and, as in a single flash, he saw Harrer on his way to the station, speaking to Valuska, then saw his friend beyond the town’s precincts, and suddenly he felt an extraordinary sense of relief, as if an enormous weight had been removed from his shoulders, a weight he had carried from the moment he set foot outside his house in Wenckheim Avenue. What he felt was indeed relief and, at the same time, some entirely new excitement seized him, for, having thought the matter through, he quickly realized that the chance, or rather, misunderstanding, that had brought him here could not have brought him to a better place, for he was precisely where he might settle the affair of his friend, where, if some kind of charge had really been mistakenly levelled at Valuska, he could persuade the authorities to drop it. Not a trace remained in him of his previous helplessness and despair, in fact he was running a little ahead of the tasks that confronted him, but when he started to get lost in the details of Valuska’s return he pulled himself up, reminded himself of the need for sobriety and concentrated entirely on the effort to catch up with events in the hall and follow the course of the interrogation in the middle, since he had concluded that the best way of putting together a clear picture of all that had happened was by assembling information from the various witnesses and drawing the appropriate conclusion. He completely shut out everything else and, after a few sentences, it became obvious to him, as to everyone else, that the current witness, the enormous man who had been his neighbour, was none other than the circus manager, or rather the director, as the man, who reminded Eszter of some Balkan landowner, kept delicately pointing out to the lieutenant in his own highly courteous manner, if only because the lieutenant, who held some documents in his hand at which he glanced from time to time, insisted in using the language of the ‘work permit’ by referring to him, despite every attempt to correct the term, as simply ‘the head of the company’, that is to say whenever he managed to interject a question in the endless stream of words issuing from the mouth of the witness. However he tried though, however frequently he commanded the man to ‘answer only the question put before you’, he did not seem to be having much success and looked ever more exhausted in the process, and as for stopping his flow, that was impossible, for the director, while acknowledging each warning with a slight bow and an ‘of course, naturally’, was not to be shifted for a moment, and not only picked up each sentence precisely at the point where he was impatiently interrupted but never once lost the thread of the argument he had been pursuing, talking ever more loudly as if with the purpose of addressing the far end of the hall, stressing and restressing the importance of ‘helping the officers present to a clearer understanding of the principles of art, and particularly the art of the circus’. He talked of the nature of art, and the thousands of years of neglect that led to misconceptions about the liberties that should be accorded to it (‘as in our case!’), drawing a wide circle with the dead cigar between his fingers as he explained that the unexpected, the shocking, the extraordinary had been one inevitable aspect of great art, just as much as the audience’s ‘unreadiness’ and ‘unpredictability’ in the face of revolutionary artistic change, and how the exceptional nature of theatrical production (he nodded as he spoke to the lieutenant who was again trying to interrupt him) was bound to confront the ignorance of the public, from which it clearly does not follow that, as some earlier witnesses had appeared to insist, the creator who strives to enrich the world with ever newer inventions should make any allowance for this ignorance, for the reason that — and here the director referred to his long years of experience, for if he could say anything at all with confidence it was this — that, beside its own ignorance, the public prized nothing so much as novelty, the greater the novelty the better, and the thing they treated in such a whimsical fashion was the very thing they most voraciously demanded. He said that he felt he was among people to whom he could speak his mind freely, so, while sticking closely to the lieutenant’s question, he just needed to say something, a single sentence, no more, that might seem unrelated: however difficult it was for him to do so, he had to admit, that in the aforementioned conflict between the liberating artist and the lack of preparedness of those at whom his work was directed, and he didn’t want to sound alarmist about this, there wasn’t very much hope of a satisfactory resolution, for it was ‘as if the Creator had set them in amber for ever’, the general public were frozen in their attitude of unreadiness, and so whoever put his faith in the power of an extraordinary spectacle was bound to come to a sad end. A sad end, repeated the director in ringing tones, and if the lieutenant — and here he dipped his cigar respectfully in the direction of the officer — were asking him whether he regarded the work of his humble, but highly committed, colleagues, as well as himself, as heroic or ridiculous in the circumstances, he would prefer, and no doubt they would understand this, not to express an opinion, or at any rate he believed that in the light of the tensions he had revealed and the supplementary point he had just made there was really not much more to explain, being certain that the clear innocence of his company in the matter of the regrettable incidents of the previous night was something he had concisely but firmly, even loudly, to state — if only because of the testimony of the local population, whose accusations demonstrated their narrow outlook — though he knew that he was wasting his breath because as soon as he opened his mouth he would be told to shut up. Perhaps he might begin — he lit what remained of his cigar — by saying that his production was concerned with the art of the circus, nothing else, so the first part of the accusation, that every attraction, every item on the bill, was merely a front, was patently false, and that he, the director of their common creative endeavour and their spiritual father, never had, nor ever would have, any ambition beyond confronting the ever growing audience with ‘the phenomenon of an extraordinary being’, and as concerned himself — if they would allow him a bitter if amusing turn of phrase — this was quite enough to be getting on with. And if this first charge was so lacking in logic, how much more was it the case with the second, according to which, as he understood from the words of hysterical local people at the outset of the interrogations, the member of his company known as ‘The Prince’—he blew out smoke and waved it away before the lieutenant’s face — was supposed to be the chief agitator behind the recent riots, which was not only impossible but, if he might be permitted to say so, perfectly ridiculous, if only because the accusation was directed precisely against the one figure who, because he had wholly identified with his controversial role even within the company itself, had most to fear from such violent developments, and who, once he saw that the director’s anxiety was justified, that the public was mistaking his stage role for reality and was therefore becoming susceptible to inflammatory rhetoric, was so terrified that, contrary to all reasonable argument, far from assuming leadership, he feared the passions of the crowd might be turned on him, and so contrived, with the assistance of his colleagues, to escape as soon as the violence began. After all this, the director said, as he put his hand behind his back, obliged to flick his ash on the floor again, the conductors of these interrogations, whom he deeply respected, might very well think that the subject was closed, it being clear as daylight that the accusations levelled against the circus were false; the over-excited performers should try to calm down and go back to what they knew best, their craft, and as concerned the rest, the investigation of the events and the apportioning of guilt, these were best left to those people best equipped to carry it out — to whose authority he naturally bowed and who he would in all respects obey, though, at the same time, his conscience obliged him to reveal everything and so, deeply affected as he was by all that had happened, he would like, by way of farewell, to make a decisive contribution to the undoubted success of the enquiry. He wanted to say something about those twenty or thirty hardened hooligans, one of whom, to the astonishment of them all, they had just been able to observe from close quarters; no more than twenty or thirty desperate scoundrels who, ever since the start of their tour of the southern lowlands, had insinuated themselves into the audience at every step, from village to village, from performance to performance, and tried their uttermost to invest each and every appearance of the company with danger. These people exploited the up to now reasonable travelling support of the company, a reasonable support which yesterday night lost all vestiges of control because their imaginations had been inflamed, their susceptibilities and credulity stretched beyond all measure, by the rumours then put about — indeed, still being put about — that ‘our excellent colleague’ was not acting the role of a prince but really was one, a kind of ‘prince of darkness’—the director smiled piteously at the expression — who strode about the world like an avenging judge and accepted the offer of his recruits to act as executives of his justice, as if that man, said he, raising his arms heavenward in indignation, blessed with all the gifts of his profession and yet, and here he slowly lowered his arms, subtly shifting the nature of his indignation, ‘stricken as he was with terrible physical handicaps, wholly dependent on others to provide him with the bare necessities of life and utterly helpless otherwise’ might have been capable of such a thing! This will be enough to convince you, said he, giving the lieutenant a hard stare, how base, how cynical, how hideously depraved this gang is, who, as we have heard said before, really do hold ‘nothing sacred’, a fact with which he, as director, had been all too familiar from the beginning of the tour, for every place they performed he had been careful to request the local authorities for assistance in order to ensure that the evening should pass without incident. And everywhere they went they had been granted this, so, naturally, he requested it here too; his first stop, as always, had been the police station, but at the time the authorization guaranteeing the security of his artistes — indeed of art itself — was granted him by the chief officer, he had no idea he was facing a man incapable of discharging his duties. He was deeply disappointed by this, he said, quite astonished, since there were only twenty or thirty rogues to manage, and here he stood now, his company broken up, his terrified colleagues ‘scattered about the world’, and he had no idea who would compensate him for the material, but, above all, psychological, losses he had had to suffer as a result. Of course, he protested, he understood that this was not the moment for the addressing of personal grievances, nevertheless, until his turn came round, as, he was sure, it quickly would, he would like to remain in town if they would grant him