the permission, and in the meantime he simply asked that the investigating officers should deal ruthlessly with the offenders, and, in that hope, he would now take his leave, passing the officer the copy of the official authorization should he have any use for it, willing to offer any feeble assistance he could in order to help them clear up the matter and uncover the truly guilty men. His speech really finished at last, the director produced a piece of paper from an inner pocket of his fur coat, and handed the ‘performance permit’ over to the helpless officer, who could barely stand on his feet for exhaustion, then, holding the freshly extinguished cigar at some distance from him, he gave a curt nod to the far end of the hall and the assembled witnesses and marched through the door, briefly turning round in the doorway to add, ‘I am staying at the Komló Hotel’, and left interrogators and interrogatees equally dumb and looking like a defeated army in the wake of an all-conquering horde. Harrer, Volent, everyone was in the same condition — not so much convinced as flattened by the sheer weight of the director’s rolling, irresistible cadences, by the combined force of something that comprised statements, arguments, pleas and revelations, in fact so utterly buried were they under it they needed someone to come along and dig them out, and it was not surprising that it took them some time before they recovered all their faculties and the numbness slowly drained from them; before the lieutenant, wounded and furious, set out to pursue the orator who had taken charge of his own fate, but glanced at the document in his hand and stopped again while Mrs Eszter and Harrer merely stared at one another; before Volent and his companions, who seemed to have turned into living statues while listening to the protestations, pulled incredulous faces, waved their arms and started speaking all together at once. Eszter remained aloof from the general hubbub which did at least reveal the state of everyone’s mind, for it was far from him to pass any judgement on anything, he was merely learning, taking things in, as if the speech and the reaction to it were of equal importance, nevertheless it seemed advisable to tender his request in a manner appropriate to the mood of the investigation committee and, especially, to try to judge the state of mind of the man who seemed most likely to make the decision regarding Valuska in the light of the director’s statement and the passions aroused by it. But this was easier said than done, for when the lieutenant, clearly undecided, went over to his chief, clicked his heels and asked, ‘Should I have him brought back, sir?’ the latter responded merely with a regretful wave of his hand which signified either utter indifference or bitter resignation; then, after a long silence, in a voice that, this time, sounded unmistakably bitter, added, ‘Tell me, Géza, my boy, have you had a really good look at this picture?’ in response to which the officer, to cover up his confusion, replied in ringing tones, ‘Beg to report, no, sir!’ ‘Then be so good as to observe,’ the wistful voice continued, ‘the order of battle at the top, there in the right-hand corner. Artillery, cavalry, infantry. This,’ he cried suddenly, ‘is not a rout led by impudent hoodlums, but the art of war!’ ‘Yessir!’ ‘Look at the hussars there in the middle, and there, you see them? The regiment of dragoons splits into two in a pincer movement and surrounds them! Note the general, there on the hill, and the troops there, on the field, and you will observe the difference between a filthy little sty and a war!’ ‘Yessir! I will conclude the interrogations at once.’ ‘Please don’t bother, lieutenant! I can’t bring myself to listen to any more screeching, to any more ridiculous nonsense, in this filthy hole! How many are left?’ ‘I shall be quick, sir!’ ‘Do hurry, Géza, my boy,’ the other excused him in the most melancholy manner, ‘Do get on with it!’ Even now only his hand was visible, but by this time Eszter was quite certain what he was doing: as the highest-ranking officer present, he was obliged to sit through the entire interrogation, and being impatient, Eszter decided, he was clearly finding consolation by surveying the nobly painted scene in a half-light that soothed him, while remaining keenly aware that the turn of events that had brought him here was somehow unfair, in which case, thought Eszter, it would be better if his own request were framed concisely, condensed into two or three sentences, and that if it were so framed it would find favour. It wasn’t his fault that things didn’t work out like this, that no amount of circumspection would have elicited a sympathetic hearing, for the three men before him quickly destroyed any hopes he might have harboured by obeying the lieutenant’s invitation and launching into speeches of their own. The very first words they spoke about how they would like ‘to shed new light on the matter’ brought a twitch to the officer’s face as he glanced towards the presidential chair, and so they continued by ‘refuting utterly the slanderous allegations against a town in mourning, allegations made by the man who had himself been responsible for the shameful events’. There was no question but that the circus and its claque comprised an indivisible whole and there wasn’t enough water in the world (screamed Mr Mádai) to wash this filthy band and its crew of bandits clean; it was wicked and pointless trying to fill people’s heads with the ‘whaler’s’ protestations of innocence because there was no fooling these old grey heads, they’d been around a bit, they were made of sterner stuff and could see through ‘a threadbare tissue of lies’. It was a lie, they clamoured over the lieutenant’s forlorn orders (the lieutenant suspected the worst), that they should rely wholly on the facts, a lie, they cut across each other, that this terrible catastrophe was caused by a few disruptive elements in the crowd, since it was clearer than daylight who had launched this infernal attack in the name of the last judgement. Because, in the final analysis, they protested more mysteriously, it was the most awful hogwash to assert that the ‘wicked sorcerer’ played no part in all this (though in the vehemence of their protestations they failed to notice that the occupant of the presidential chair had abandoned his earlier invisibility, stood up and started to stride menacingly towards them) for, in the final analysis, they continued, everyone knew that it wasn’t ‘twenty or thirty hooligans’ but the devil’s own chosen who had stormed the defenceless town, and that there had been countless signs and portents of this in the preceding months. As to details, why, they had plenty of details ‘of water-towers brought down by distant influence, of church clocks that had been stopped for centuries suddenly and spontaneously starting to move again, of trees uprooted all over the district’, announcing in the meantime that they, at least, ‘were ready to do battle with satanic powers’ and offering ‘the support of their weak arms to the regular forces of law and order’. But at this point they ran out of time for the leader of the aforementioned regular forces reached them and bellowed at them with a clarity that even Mr Mádai could understand: ‘Enough of this, you blasted fools! How long, do you think,’ he bent over the retreating and terrified figure of Mr Nadabán, ‘can I bear to put up with this claptrap! Who are you to play havoc with my patience! Ever since dawn I have had to listen to nothing but retarded babble, and you think you can carry on like this with impunity?! To me, who the day before yesterday in Telekgerendas locked every shithead fool up in the asylum?! You think I’ll make an exception of you?! Don’t delude yourselves, I’ll have the whole stinking place behind bars, this filthy hole where every godforsaken idiot behaves as if he were the centre and keeper of the universe, God blast him! Catastrophe! Of course! Last judgement! Horseshit! It’s you that are the catastrophe, you’re the bloody last judgement, your feet don’t even touch the ground, you bunch of sleepwalkers. I wish you were dead, the lot of you. Let’s make a bet,’ and here he shook Nadabán by the shoulders, ‘that you don’t even know what I’m talking about!! Because you don’t