SERMO SUPER SEPULCHRUM. Conclusion
IT WAS THE CHERRIES PRESERVED IN RUM THAT she liked best. The others were nice too, but now, after precisely two weeks of tense preparation, the day had come when, before the very important event to follow in the afternoon, there was sufficient time to consider minor details and she might decide which particular preserves of all those stored in the cupboard of the temporary secretarial office, preserves selected from among various hams and other cold meats taken from Mrs Plauf’s apartment under the ‘social use’ rule and brought to the cellar of the town hall where she and Harrer had divided them up between themselves, she would most prefer for breakfast, and she had firmly chosen this one, not because the peach or pear fell short of the cherries in quality, but because when she tasted the delicate concoction prepared by ‘Mrs Plauf who had met such a sad fate’ the fruit soaked in rum, with its ‘subtly resistant acridity’, reminded her of an evening visit that seemed to belong to an almost antediluvian past, and her mouth was immediately filled with the taste of victory, the triumph she had hardly had time to savour but now at last could wallow in as she sat at her ease behind her enormous desk with the whole morning ahead of her, since she had nothing to do but lean over the jar with a teaspoon so not a drop should be spilt, and lift out one cherry after another, breaking the skins gently with her teeth, wholly immersed in the undisturbed enjoyment of office and reviewing the vital steps that had led to it. It was, she believed, no exaggeration, to refer to the events of the last fourteen days as ‘a veritable transfer of power’ which had propelled ‘one who had deserved it’ from a room in Honvéd Passage, rented by the month, and an undeniably prophetic though hardly, at that stage, significant post on the women’s committee, straight to the secretarial office of the town hall; no exaggeration at all, she thought as she bit another cherry in half and spat the stone into the litter basket at her feet, since this mark of honour was really no more than ‘the direct consequence of the recognition of her superior lucidity of mind’, a superiority that had delivered the fate of the town, with a firmness that bore no question, once and for all into her hands, which were entirely capable of exercising the appropriate powers, so that she should do with the town whatever (she almost said, ‘whatever she wanted’) she, Mrs Eszter, who only a fortnight ago was unforgivably sidelined but was now mistress of all she surveyed (‘… and, let us add,’ she added, trying a brief smile, ‘had carried off all the laurels at one go’), thought fit to do in its present or future interest. Naturally there was no suggestion that the office had merely ‘fallen into her lap’, for she had earned it, having risked everything, but she didn’t mind people saying that ‘her rise was meteoric’, for when she thought it over, she herself could think of no better figure of speech; none, since it had taken only fourteen days for the whole town to be ‘spread at her feet’, fourteen days, or rather, a single night, or, to be even more exact, a mere few hours in which everything was decided, including ‘who was who and who had real power’. A few hours, Mrs Eszter marvelled, that’s all it took, when on the fateful evening, or to be more accurate, early afternoon, some sixth sense told her the task was not to prevent the likely course of events but, on the contrary, to give them
full play, allow them the maximum scope, since deep down in her bones she felt what ‘those three hundred or so sinister bandits’ in the market square might mean to her, provided — and she had to countenance the possibility—‘they were not merely an army of mother’s boys who, when it came to it, would run from their own shadows’. Well, she leaned back in her chair, they really did shrink from nothing, but she, once having decided on a course of action, had never lost her head, had taken every possibility into account, and moved with absolute and fatal precision only when she had to, and ‘events’ moved so steadily in the desired direction, at the desired pace, that occasionally, particularly later in the night, she began to feel she was plotting and directing their course, rather than taking advantage of their, in any case, favourable essence. Certainly she had a clear idea of her own worth — she leaned forward and popped another cherry into her mouth — but no one could have charged her with arrogance or hollow vaingloriousness, she thought, though ‘they should allow her’, at least now, in the present circumstances, in her solitary cherry picking, ‘the credit, not only for the stroke of genius in conceiving of the timetable of events, but for her care over detail’, without which the grandest schemes are doomed to disappointment. No, she admitted it, it didn’t require an above-average intelligence to wind the few members of the committee she herself had organized in Honvéd Passage round her little finger on that memorable afternoon, especially the mayor, who was paralysed with fear; nor did it take any great effort to arrange that the chief of police, who, as the night wore on, was growing dangerously sober and was about to send out for reinforcements, should, unknown to the others, be smuggled by her (on the pretext of showing him out) into her lodger’s quarters where her female tenant kept the unmanned ‘bag of booze’ serviced with her awful wine right until morning so he would be safely tucked up in dreamland; it was ‘no problem’—Mrs Eszter curled her lip — enticing her blindly obedient follower, Harrer, to find ‘that half-wit Valuska’ who might instinctively have suspected something and put together certain facts in his ‘addled brain’, to find him and silence him by persuading him to leave by the most direct way: no, all this leading of the distinguished company by the nose did not require ‘any particular intelligence’, but the im-pecc-able (the secretary tapped her teaspoon on the table for emphasis) timing of events, now that was something! Ultimately, to have arranged matters so that every part of the machinery should be oiled and working smoothly, ‘planning on the hoof and bringing the plan to realization’ in order that she should be able to sweep away every obstacle before her well-placed allies, all in one blessed moment, and then to build on that precise moment so that she should develop an immediate reputation for muscle, which would in turn raise her to the position of the most likely leader of the resistance, all this, ‘even had the conception itself been of a far more modest nature’, amounted to an achievement — she brushed away a lock of hair that had fallen on to her forehead — that was ‘not exactly ordinary’! Very well, she waved away her own interjection, there was no need to explain that her work on all those apparently insignificant details would have amounted to nothing if she had lacked the central vision by which her plans for the future ‘stood or fell’, since it was as clear as daylight that apart from the harmonization and timing of all the details, the thing that