really mattered was the timing of the whole, in other words to decide, sound out and in-stinct-ual-ize the perfect moment when she could employ Harrer ‘in the police chief’s name’ to bring into play the two policemen in the Jeep who had been waiting prepared for hours, wholly ignorant of the reason for delay, behind the Milk Powder Factory — prepared to go for ‘immediate’ reinforcements, to the county capital … If the ‘forces of liberation’ had arrived too early there would have been only ‘some minor acts of vandalism’, a few broken windows, a smashed shop-front or two, and by the following day life would have carried on as before: if too late, the scale of the conflict might have swept her away too, and it would have been all in vain; yes, thought Mrs Eszter as she recalled ‘the tense atmosphere of those heroic hours’, she had to find the median point between those two extremes, and — she looked round the secretarial office in triumph — thanks to Harrer’s valuable services as messenger and to the availability of constantly fresh information, she did find that point and that meant she had nothing to do but to allow news of the influx of soldiers to filter out through her door in the person of the deathly pale mayor who was dying to get home, then compose her mind as to what she should say while the two policemen returned with the message: ‘Would the town’s saviour care to come over to the town hall?’ In retrospect perhaps her greatest moment had been when she stood before the colonel and, without having to change a word of her speech, could tell him the precise truth, though she had to admit that she could scarcely have done anything else, since something in her heart at the first moment of their meeting told her that the commanding officer of the liberating forces would ‘liberate’ not only the town, but herself. Everything, even to that point, had been as easy as pie, and since she took care in her preliminary remarks to disown the title so generously bestowed on her (to the effect that she was no hero, she did only what any feeble woman might do in similar circumstances, surrounded as she was by impotence, helplessness and cowardice enough to bring a blush to anyone’s cheeks), all she needed to do was to present her information in the best order and in simple, clear and precise sentences to convey the ‘sad, but true’ fact that there had been a social breakdown owing to ‘inadequate arrangements on the part of the authorities’, nothing more, the chief police officer not being in ‘the proper place at the proper time’, for if he had the mob could not have been brought to the point of lawlessness by a small group of drunken hooligans. She would not claim, she added when she had finished her account of events, that this state of anarchy was not representative of the town’s condition, for that was precisely what it was, since the circumstances that had allowed this vandalism to flourish had their root in ‘the general lack of discipline’. She would be astonished, she waved her hand in the direction of the council-chamber door on that ‘most glorious of dawns’, if the colonel had the patience to listen to the testimony of all those local people waiting outside, which would be enough to try a saint’s patience, for he would soon see what a pitiable gathering of lily-livered cowards she had had to cope with these last few decades in the noble cause of ‘law, order and clear thinking’ so that they might attain some sense of reality (the secretary shivered with pleasure at the word even now in the midst of her meditations) and be led away from ‘the foul marsh of illusions in which they foundered’ back to health, action and a respect for re-a-li-sm, which demanded that all the self-deluded, mystificatory, paralysed members of society should simply be ‘swept away’, along with those who cravenly hid from responsibility, from ‘the daily appointed tasks’ incumbent on them, and those who failed to realize or attempted to ignore the fact that life was a war where there were winners and losers, lulled as they were by the mystical illusion that weaklings might be insured against their fate, who attempted to ‘stop any breath of fresh air’ by suffocating the source with soft little pillows. Instead of muscles they cultivated rolls of fat and bags of skin; instead of fit bodies they encouraged wasting and excess; instead of clear bold looks they went about with self-centred little squints: to come to the point, they chose saccharine illusions over reality! She didn’t want to get carried away, but she was forced to live in an atmosphere that she could describe only as stifling, Mrs Eszter burst out bitterly to the colonel, but he knew as well as she did that no matter which end of a fish you take, head or tail, as the saying goes, it stinks just the same; the court had only to look at the state of the streets to see what a sorry pass the patently unfit leadership had brought the town to, and no doubt they would draw the inevitable conclusions from that … Though at this point, she recalled with a blush, she was hardly aware of what she was saying as she was falling ever more under the colonel’s spell, and he, before ‘the saviour of the place’ found herself utterly flustered, thanked her for her report with a simple nod, and with ‘a look that said everything’ invited her to be present at the interrogations; yes, she had fallen under his spell, a hot flush ran through the secretary, that nod had bowled her over, since her ‘heart’ told her, not with a single thump but with a veritable rumble of thunder, that though no one in her fifty-two years had managed to ‘set off that mechanism’, here was one who could! Here was someone who immediately drew her into his enchanting presence, someone with whom she immediately established ‘a silent dialogue’, someone who could (no, ‘did’, she corrected herself with another blush) make something she had never even dared to think might happen come true! It was a wonder that ‘such a feeling really existed’ and it wasn’t simply romantic nonsense that people fell in love ‘at first sight’, ‘blindly’ and ‘for ever’; that there was a condition in which one stood as if struck by lightning and wondered agonizingly whether the other felt the same! For ever since the interrogations had begun, she really had ‘just stood there’ for hours on end in the council chamber, and even though she did not neglect to pay due attention to the increasingly advantageous procedure, her spellbound being was ‘essentially’ focused, from beginning to end, on the colonel in the background. His build? His bearing? His appearance? She would have found it difficult to say, but until ‘their fate was sealed’ she waited, now in heaven, now in hell (‘He is thinking of me … No, he hasn’t even noticed me’), for the moment that he stood up — yes, he was standing up! — and came over to her to give her some secret sign, practically to declare his affection! It was all fire, all flames within, high on a peak one moment, deep in the pits the next, though no one would have known this to look at her, because even then, when, in the course of dealing with the matter of Valuska, thanks to her presence of mind, they managed to free themselves of Eszter (who, fortunately, had failed to reveal his name) in the most marvellous way without any agonizing prelude, and then, by a kind of mutual conspiracy, got rid of Harrer too by sending him about various commissions, so that finally they were left alone in the hall; even then she was capable of exercising remarkable control over her facial muscles if not her feelings, which she covered with a happy smile at the corner of her lips, there being nothing left that could stop her. She took a cherry, slipped it into her mouth, but did not bite it, simply sucked at it and thought back to the empty hall and the ten to fifteen minutes that followed: the colonel had begged her pardon for his earlier loss of temper, to which she answered that it was understandable that a real man should fail to keep his temper in the presence of so many ninnies, then they talked a little about the state of the nation, and in the course of passionately declaiming one thing and mildly decrying another, he interjected a passing remark about how wonderfully those ‘two tiny earrings’ suited her. They talked about the future of the town and agreed that ‘a firm hand was what was needed’, though they would have to discuss the precise details of how and when the next day under calmer circumstances, the colonel declared, gazing deeply into her eyes, while she, after a moment’s thought, accepted the idea, and, since she had always considered her individual life as subject to the public good, suggested the best place for this might be with a cup of tea and some nice little cakes in her own apartment at 36 Béla Wenckheim Avenue … So everything was pretty well arranged, Mrs Eszter nodded approvingly as she slowly squashed the cherry against the roof of her mouth with her tongue, everything, since there was nothing else that might explain this mutual attraction, this surge of feeling and, now she could say it, the veritable explosion of their discovery of each other, for beside the sheer sense of delight, it was, for her, the compatibility, the immediate recognition of their having been made for each other, the extraordinary speed and power of the tide that swept them together, that seemed the most wonderful, the way — as it soon transpired — not only for her, but for him too, ‘things’ had been resolved in a moment, and there was no real need for those ten or fifteen minutes — the colonel’s words died quietly away in her — merely to ‘build a few bridges’. She hadn’t hesitated, she hadn’t stopped to weigh things up, she had prepared for the evening by giving only half her mind to the immediate issues involved in the so-called, but in all probability, short ‘interregnum’, giving speeches at her gate, consoling the bereaved, making announcements to the effect of ‘tomorrow we start rebuilding our future’, then — since who was she now to fuss over minor matters of transportage? — arranging with Harrer the transfer of her hastily packed effects by a bunch of layabouts from Honvéd Passage to the house in Wenckheim Avenue, and having assigned the wholly unresisting Eszter, whom events had once again bypassed, to the servants’ room next to the kitchen, proceeding to throw out the tired old furniture and, putting her bed, chair and table in their place, installing herself in the drawing room. She dressed herself in her finest clothes, the black velvet outfit, the one with the long zip at the back, prepared water for the tea, arranged a few pieces of cake on an aluminium tray covered in paper, and carefully brushed her hair behind her ears. That was all there was to it, no more was needed, for in their two persons — the colonel, who arrived at precisely eight o’clock on the dot, and she herself, unable any longer to control her feelings — two wholly consuming passions had met, two passions that required nothing apart from each other, two souls who celebrated their eternal union through the corresponding ‘union of the body’. She had had to wait fifty-two years, but it had not been in vain, because that wonderful night a real man taught her that ‘the body was worth nothing without the soul’, because that unforgettable encounter, which lasted well into dawn before they fell asleep, brought not only sensual fulfilment but — and she hadn’t been ashamed to use the word on that dawn—