talk, you “whisper” or “expostulate”; you don’t walk down the street but “proceed feverishly”; you don’t enter a place but “cross its threshold”, you don’t feel cold or hot, but “find yourselves shivering” or “feeling the sweat pour down you”! I haven’t heard a straight word for hours, you can only mew and caterwaul; because if a hooligan throws a brick through your window you invoke the last judgement, because your brains are addled and filled up with steam, because if someone sticks your nose in shit all you do is sniff, stare and cry “sorcery!” What would really be sorcery, you degenerates, is if someone were to wake you up and you realized that you lived not on the moon but in Hungary, with north at the top and south at the bottom, in a place where Monday is the first day of the week and January the first month of the year! You haven’t the faintest notion of anything, you couldn’t tell a trench mortar from three stacks of air-rifles but go wittering on about “the cataclysm that signals the end of the world”, or some other garbage, and think I have nothing better to do than tramp the roads between Csongrád and Vesztö with two hundred professional soldiers to defend you from a bunch of yobs!!! Look at this specimen,’ said he to the lieutenant, indicating Mr Volent, then pushing his face right into that of his victim. ‘What year is this, eh?! What is the name of the prime minister?! Is the Danube navigable?! Look at him,’ he looked round to the lieutenant, ‘he hasn’t a clue! And they’re all like him, the whole lousy town, this whole leper colony is full of them! Géza, my boy,’ he called, his voice turning indifferent and bitter, ‘drag the circus truck out to the station, pass the matter over to the military tribunal, leave four or five detachments in the square and get rid of these delicate souls, because I just … I just want to be through with it!!!’ The three worthies stood before him as if a bolt from hell had scored a direct hit on them, not breathing, unable to speak a word, and when the colonel turned away they were incapable of moving a muscle; under the circumstances it wasn’t too hard to see that without some outside help none of them could understand what they should do, so the lieutenant pointed decisively at the door and ushered them out of it double quick as if that was all the help they needed and they would somehow make their way home by themselves. Not Eszter though, whose hopes of a favourable hearing had been dashed by the colonel’s unexpected outburst; he didn’t know what to do, to stand or sit, to stay or go. He remained indifferent to anything except the best way of exonerating Valuska, but after all that had happened even a crisp, precise formulation seemed singularly unpromising, so he sat there like someone about to get up and watched as the thick-set, red-faced colonel pulled at his military moustache and, with his exhausted lieutenant in tow, retreated in a huff to the corner where Mrs Eszter stood waiting. There was not a crease in his uniform in that vast hall, and his whole being seemed somehow ironed out, both without and within; his decisive stride, his ramrod-straight back, his obscene but direct manner of speaking combined to produce this effect, this ideal, and he was satisfied with the result as was patently clear from the sound of his voice, that crackling, snappish instrument made to command, with which he now addressed Mrs Eszter. ‘Tell me, madam, how a practical sober woman like you could stand this year after year?’ The question required no answer but you could see that Mrs Eszter, who raised her eyes to the ceiling as if contemplating one, did after all want to say something, something that was fated not to be said because the colonel at this point happened to glance in the direction of the far wall and saw that one of the witnesses had in scandalous fashion succeeded in remaining there, and, with clouded brow, he bellowed at his lieutenant: ‘I told you to get rid of everyone!’ ‘I’d like to make a statement concerning János Valuska,’ said Eszter, rising from his seat, and seeing that the colonel had turned away and crossed his arms, condensed all he had to say in a single sentence, stating quietly: ‘He is wholly innocent.’ ‘What do we know about him?’ the colonel barked impatiently. ‘Was he one of them?’ ‘According to the unanimous testimony of the witnesses, he was,’ the lieutenant answered. ‘He’s still at liberty.’ ‘Military tribunal for him then!’ the colonel retorted, but before he could regard the matter as finished and continue his conversation, Mrs Eszter cut in. ‘Allow me to make a brief comment, colonel.’ ‘My dear lady, you know that you are the only person in this place whose voice I am happy to hear. Excepting my own, of course,’ he added with the most fleeting of smiles to acknowledge the joke, but joined in the loud and raucous laughter that followed and echoed round the walls, as if to signify the company’s astonishment that he, who was the complete master of the situation, should be so eminently capable of dazzling them with not only his self-control but — remarkably — his wit. ‘The person in question,’ said Mrs Eszter, once the laughter had died away, ‘is not accountable’. ‘What do you mean, madam?’ ‘I mean he is mentally deficient.’ ‘In that case,’ the colonel shrugged, ‘I’ll lock him up in the asylum. At least there’s someone I can lock up …’ he added, twirling his moustache with a suppressed smile, thereby alerting the company to the irresistible punchline of another marvellous joke, ‘… though the whole town belongs in the loony-bin …’ Laughter was certain to erupt at this point, and so it did, and as Eszter gazed at them, particularly noting his wife, who had not cast a glance at him, he understood that everything had been decided, that he had no means of persuading the humorous company to a more appropriate evaluation of the facts, so the best thing for him to do was to leave the room and go home. ‘Valuska is alive, that is all that matters …’ he thought and stepped through the door, cutting through the group of locals and military hanging about the entrance, descending the stairs with the fading echo of Mrs Eszter’s and the colonel’s competing gales of laughter in his ears, making his way down the ringing ground-floor corridors of the town hall, and, when he reached the street, trusting to his instinct and automatically turned right towards Árpád Street, so lost in his own thoughts that he didn’t hear when one of the bystanders at the gate, one who had succeeded in overcoming his horror at seeing the picturesque delights of the town in such a ruinous condition, greeted him faintly: ‘Good day, professor, sir …’ Nothing matters, thought Eszter, and probably because he had worn his coat throughout the interrogations in the warm hall started to shiver halfway down Árpád Street. Nothing, he kept saying to himself as he walked, even once he had arrived at his home in Wenckheim Avenue, more by blind instinct and chance than calculation. He opened the gate, shut it after him and fished his key from his pocket, but it seemed that Mrs Harrer, no doubt by design, having taken some thought, had left the door open, and so he put the key back in his pocket, pushed the door open, proceeded down the hall between the rows of bookcases, and, keeping his coat on so he should warm up a bit, settled down on the bed in the drawing room. Then he got up, went back out into the hall, paused a moment in front of one of the bookcases, tilting his head to examine the titles, then went into the kitchen and adjusted a glass by the sink so it shouldn’t be carelessly knocked over. But then he decided not to keep his coat on, so he took it off, took a clothes brush and carefully dusted it down, and once he had finished returned to the drawing room with it, opened the wardrobe, removed a hanger and hung the coat away. He looked at the stove where the embers were still glowing, threw on some kindling in the hope they would catch light, and, since he wasn’t hungry, did not go back into the kitchen to make himself some dinner but decided to wait till later and have a cold meal, which would do perfectly well, he thought. He would like to have known the time, but since he hadn’t wound his wristwatch last night it still showed a quarter past eight, and so, as this had happened to him before, he did what he usually did in such circumstances and consulted the clock on the tower of the evangelical church, but, of course, the boards he had put up prevented him opening the window. So he brought in the axe and pried the planks off, opened the window wide and leaned out; then, glancing now at the tower, now at his watch, he set the latter to the correct time and wound the spring. His eye next fell on the Steinway, and thinking that nothing would calm him as effectively as ‘a bit of Johann Sebastian’ he sat down to play, not as he had done in recent years, but as ‘Johann Sebastian himself might have done in his day’. But the piano was out of tune, and had to be readjusted to the full Werckmeister harmonic scale, so, opening the lid, he found the tuning key, found the frequency modulator in the cupboard, removed the music stand so that he might be able to get to the keys, rested the modulator in his lap and sat down to work. He was surprised to find that it was much easier in this fashion to retune the instrument than it had been, a few years earlier, to tune it to the Aristoxenus system, but even so it took him a full three hours before every note was where it should be. He grew so absorbed in this that he was only half aware of any extraneous sound, but suddenly, out in the hall, a really loud noise roused him, there was a draft, doors were being slammed, and he seemed to hear Mrs Eszter’s voice shouting: ‘This goes here! And put that down at the end, I’ll put it away later!’ But he was no longer interested, as far as he was concerned they could slam doors and shout at each other ‘till they were blue in the face’: he ran his fingers quickly down the scale to check the pitch once more, then turned to the right page in the score, placed his hand on the pure, consoling keyboard, and struck the first chords of the Prelude in B Major.