love. She would never have thought that this wonderful realm existed at all, that she’d get to know quite so many ‘delightful manoeuvres in that delicious battle’ or that the ‘swell of the rising tide’ in her heart could be so liberatingly intoxicating, though the key that unlocked the hidden recesses of her being — she shut her eyes and blushed all over again as she confessed it — lay in the colonel’s hands. In the figure of her colonel, whom she addressed, ‘quite naturally’ by this time, as Peter, in whose strong arms she had suffered ecstasy some eight times, and who with his own hands had sealed this jar of preserves with cellophane and a rubber band, she had found someone with whom she could arrange the town’s future but at the same time discuss the situation in general. What kind of country was this, they asked in complete agreement (and now that she recalled it, it was seven times), that required a military tribunal, an officer with absolute authority and a full military unit at his disposal to march to and fro in order to preserve local law and order? What kind of country was it where soldiers were employed as firemen to flit here and there and put out the fiddling flames started by a few emboldened hooligans? ‘Believe me, my dear Tunde,’ the colonel grumbled again, ‘I can hardly bear to look at the single tank you saw in the main square, I’m so ashamed of it! I drag it about with me like the old ruffian with the cigar does his whale. I show it to give people a fright, for apart from one or two training exercises I can’t remember a single occasion when I’ve fired the thing, and I didn’t set out with the idea of running a circus but to be a soldier and, naturally, I want to fire it!’ ‘Then fire it, Peter …!’ she replied flirtatiously, and he did, seven times, one after another, for every agreement and command could wait till the next day, it was the present that interested them now, the inexhaustible joy of being together, in love; then, at dawn, he bade her farewell in front of the house, and as he got into the waiting Jeep they said those words that wanted to say so much more (‘Tünde!’ ‘Peter!’) and he shouted out the promise she had not forgotten as he was leaving in the still dim light from the window of the disappearing Jeep: ‘I’ll call round whenever I can!’ No one who knew her at all — she rose from the writing desk — could say that she had ever lacked the strength, but the energy with which she attacked the task of planning after that decisive night surprised even her, and within fourteen days she had not only ‘swept away the old and established the new’ but on further ‘continuous surges of energy’ she had earned local people’s praise and support, local people who, according to all the evidence, had finally come to recognize that it was ‘better to burn in a fever of activity than to put your slippers on and hide your head in the pillows’, people who, since she had gained their confidence, no longer con-de-scend-ed to her, but on the contrary — she stepped over to the window, her hands behind her back—‘looked up’ to her. The fact was — she scanned the street from one end to the other — she had found herself in a situation where whatever she did met with immediate success, everything came easily and naturally to hand, and the entire ‘assumption of power’ was no more than child’s play: all she had to do was to reap the fruit of her labours. The first week had been spent chiefly in ‘picking up the threads’, that is to say in carefully watching whether the fates of the more prominent witnesses and ‘the analysis and investigation of the vandalism’ were really proceeding according to plan, or rather, accorded to the elements of the account she had given that memorable day in the council chamber, and noting with amazement how everything was falling perfectly into place, how every judgement, human or divine, that affected those who had taken part seemed, almost supernaturally, to support her position. The circus had done its valuable work, because, even if The Prince and his factotum had not yet been caught, the director (‘the old cigar-smoking ruffian’ as Peter referred to him) had been deported, the whale removed and the prison was stuffed with ‘various aiders, abetters and accomplices’, and, so that local events should not trigger even minor incidents in the surrounding area, they cleverly spread the rumour that the company had been working under the instruction of foreign intelligence agencies. The chief of police, at least until his transfer to Vas County, had been assigned for three months to an alcohol-dependency institution somewhere out in the sticks and his two boys placed in a children’s home, and, in the meantime, the powers of the old mayor — who was allowed to keep his title — had been transferred to his newly appointed secretary. Valuska, who hadn’t got very far that ‘epoch-making morning’ (‘epoch-making’ for him to be sure), if only because he had stopped to ask directions of a policeman the previous night, had been sectioned ‘for life, for all practical purposes’ in a secure ward of the town’s mental asylum. Harrer had been appointed to the town hall staff as a temporary secretarial assistant until some permanent post could be found for him, and, to cap it all, the town had been advanced a considerable amount of credit for ‘development’. That was just the first week — Mrs Eszter cracked her knuckles behind her back — by the second her tidy yard and orderly house movement had ‘got up a real head of steam’, so that within five days of ‘the terrible riot’, shops had opened and their shelves were beginning to show ‘signs of commercial activity’; the whole population was going about its business and had continued to do so; all the administrative departments were up and functioning, with the old staff, it is true, but with a new spirit; there was teaching in the schools, telephone communications had improved, fuel was available once more so that traffic could get moving again, albeit in a much reduced but still valuable fashion, trains were running quite well in the circumstances, the streets were fully lit at night and there was plenty of wood and coal to keep the fires burning; in other words, the transfusion had been successful, the town was breathing again and she — she moved her neck gently to refresh herself — was standing at the apex of it all. There was no time to ponder how things might proceed from here, for at that moment her hitherto uninterrupted reflections were brought to an abrupt end by a knock on the door, so she returned to her desk, hid the preserve jar, adjusted her chair, cleared her throat and crossed her legs. Then, once she had pronounced a loud and resonant ‘Come in!’ Harrer entered, shut the door behind him, took a step towards the desk, stepped back again, hesitated, crossed his hands in front of his lap and, in his usual shifty way, cast sharp glances here and there to see whether anything important had happened in the interval between his knocking and the invitation to enter. He was bringing news, he said, ‘concerning the matter’ with which the good lady had entrusted him last Monday: he had at last found a man who, in his opinion, might be accepted into the new police force at a low level, in that he satisfied both requirements, being, on the one hand, local, and on the other — Harrer blinked — having already shown his ‘suitability on a specific occasion’; and, since there was plenty of time left before the funeral he had brought him straight here from the Nile public house, and because he had assured him that anything that might be said would remain confidential, behind closed doors, the ‘person in question’ was willing to put himself ‘to the test’, and therefore, Harrer suggested, they might conduct the interview right here and now. ‘Now, perhaps,’ the secretary retorted, ‘but not here!’ then, after a moment’s thought, she gave Harrer a real dressing down for not being careful enough, asking him finally what he was doing in the Nile when his place should have been beside her from morning till night, and, dismissing his excuses, explained to him that half an hour from now, not a minute earlier or later, he should appear together with the ‘person in question’ at the house in Wenckheim Avenue. Harrer didn’t dare say anything, just gave a nod to signify he understood, and another in response to the parting remark, ‘… and the secretarial car should be waiting in front of the house at a quarter past twelve!’ then slipped out while Mrs Eszter, with a careworn expression on her face, made a note to herself that unfortunately she must get used to the fact that ‘someone in her position cannot relax for a minute’. But she did not seriously fear that her splendidly industrious, but impulsive right-hand man (‘you have to watch him or he gallops off on some daft idea …’), who had to be kept on a tight leash, had entirely spoilt what had promised to be a quiet morning of ‘the enjoyment of newly gained power’, for as soon as she left the office and stepped through the doors of the town hall in her simple leather coat, tens if not hundreds of people turned immediately to her, and once she reached Árpád Street ‘a veritable guard of honour’ might have been formed of the citizens conscientiously labouring in front of their houses. Everyone was hard at work: grandfathers, grandmothers, men, women, large and small, thin and fat, were all busy with pickaxes, spades and wheelbarrows clearing up the ice-bound rubbish on the pavement and the areas designated for them in front of their gates, clearly going at it with ‘great relish’. Each little group, as soon as she reached them, stopped work for a moment, downed pickaxe, spade and wheelbarrow, greeted her with an occasional cheerful, ‘Good day!’ or, ‘Taking the air, are we?’ and, since it was an open secret that she was the president of the movement’s evaluation committee, set to work again even more heartily than before, if that was possible. Once or twice she heard voices some way ahead of her announcing, ‘Here comes our secretary!’ and there was no reason for her to be embarrassed by the fact that her heart was thumping proudly halfway down Árpád Street; she continued at a brisk pace, moving past them with a little wave here and there, though once these greetings started showering down on her with ever more vehemence towards the end of the street, she couldn’t help but relax her well-known grim expression — grim because she carried so much expectation and responsibility on her shoulders! — and almost smile. Had she not repeated a hundred times in the last fortnight that it was best to draw a veil over what had passed, because it was only ‘by considering “what should be” and “what we want” that we get from square one to square two’; no, she had never ceased filling their ears with that ‘clarion call’, but now, for the first time, following this rewarding display of confidence, she herself considered taking that advice, thinking, ‘Yes, let’s draw a veil over that,’ but as she turned the corner of the avenue she reminded herself, ‘What was I to you, or you to me?’ The masses cannot achieve anything without a leader, but without their confidence — she opened the gate to the house — the leader is impotent, and these particular masses were ‘not at all such bad material’ though, she immediately added, she herself ‘was no ordinary leader’. We shall be all right, ladies and gentlemen, she reflected with satisfaction as she thought of the people in Árpád Street, and later, once there had been some progress, ‘the leash need not be so tight, nor the secretary so demanding