Those of us who are gathered here know that all life ends in death. Now some of you might be thinking, that is nothing new, but, as the poet said, there really is nothing new under the sun. Death is our destiny, it’s the full stop at the end of the line, and not a child born today can hope to escape it. We are all aware of this, and yet, even now, it is not altogether sadness that we feel, but a kind of determination, a raising of the spirits, for the woman we are burying, my fellow citizens, was far from ordinary. I don’t like grand gestures or fancy phrases, so all I say is that, today, we are taking leave of a real human being. Here we stand at the graveside, all of us, large and small, old and young, because this is where we want to be, at the end of someone’s life. Someone we loved, someone who did what she had to do, someone to whom modesty was a byword, someone whose life we all celebrate, particularly now, at her death. And in her life we celebrate courage, courage that puts us all — you, me, even her own self — to shame, because, my fellow citizens, this simple woman was the only one among us who dared to resist those whom none of us opposed. Was she a hero? I ask myself. Yes, most certainly: that noble word is the right one for Mrs József Plauf, and with all my heart I endorse it. It was her son she set out to find on that night of tribulation, her son, but, my fellow citizens, I know, you know, and indeed she herself knew, that she did so on behalf of us all, to show us that courage and the spirit of battle were not altogether dead in our sheltered age. She showed us how to live; she showed us what it is to retain our humanity in the most adverse of circumstances; she showed us and all succeeding generations how we may behave provided our hearts are in the right place. Today we bid farewell to a mother with an ungrateful son, a widow who remained faithful after the death of two husbands, a simple woman who loved beauty, a woman who sacrificed her life so that we may better enjoy ours. I see her now on that dreadful night, saying to herself: this is truly unbearable. I see her now, putting on her coat to struggle against overwhelming odds. My fellow citizens: she knew that she might fail; she knew that her frail limbs were inadequate to the inevitable conflict with those desperate and evil men; she knew it all, and yet she did not flinch from danger because she was a human being, a human being who never gave up. The power of the many triumphed and she perished, but I say to you, it is she who was the victor and it was her murderers who perished, because she, in her isolation, was capable of inflicting defeat on them, in that all the assailants became objects of ridicule. She humiliated them. How? By her resistance, by her unwillingness to surrender without a fight, she, who all by herself took up the battle, which is why I say victory is hers. Go then, Mrs József Plauf, go to your well-deserved resting place, rest from your suffering: your spirit, your memory, your strength set us a truly heroic example and remain with us. You belong to us: it is only your body that perishes. We return you to the earth that bore you, not weeping that your bones must turn to dust, not weeping because we have your real presence here with us, for ever, and the workers of decay have nothing but your dust to thrive on.
The unchained workers of decay were waiting in a dormant state for the necessary conditions to be established, as soon enough they would be, when they might recommence their interrupted struggle, that predetermined, merciless assault in the course of which they would dismantle whatever had been alive once and once only, reducing it into tiny insignificant pieces under the eternally silent cover of death. The unfavourable circumstances had lasted weeks, even months: that is to say the outside, or rather, outer temperature, had been far too low, and, as a result, the constitution that should have ended had been frozen rock hard, its stricken assailants reduced to impotence, the condemned structure itself so firmly suspended in it that nothing did in fact actually happen; a perfect, complete stasis possessed the field, turning the body into a stable waxwork, an existence without content, a unique gap in time, as everything ground to an utter halt. Then there followed a slow, a very slow awakening; the body escaped its icy captivity, and once again the assault proceeded to command with ever increasing ferocity. Now the attack was concentrated on the albuminous matter of the muscles, culminating in an irresistibly one-sided dissimulatory exchange of material; the adenozintriphosphatase enzymes continued their assault on the central fortress of the general energy level, the ATP, and this resulted in the energy of the torn cell tissue, whose position was quite indefensible, being linked to the breakdown of actomyosin related to the ATP, which inevitably led to the contraction of the muscles. At the same time the continuously dissolving and naturally shrinking adenozintriphosphate could not be replenished by either a source of oxidization or glycolysis, and owing to a complete lack of resynthesis, the whole apparatus began to ebb, so that finally, with the concurrent support of the accumulated lactic acid, the contraction of the muscles was succeeded by rigor mortis. This in turn became subject to the law of gravity, and the blood gathered at the deepest points of the weird system, which, having been the main target of the offensive — at least until the final annihilating defeat — now faced a two-pronged assault on its fibrin content. The fibrinogen that in the first stages of the assault, even before the ceasefire, had been circulating in fluid form through the cardiovascular system, now lost two pairs of peptides from its activated trombin, and the fibrin molecules that formed everywhere as a result combined to form a highly resistant suspension composed of chains. None of this lasted long though because following the outbreak of anoxia associated with death, the plasminogens that had been activated into plasmin broke down the fibrin chains into polypeptides, so that the struggle — now in support of the attack from the other direction of great masses of adrenalin with its fibrin-dissolving properties — having reversed the process that enabled the blood to flow, at the same time ensured the resounding success of the units delegated to oppose haemostasis. The battle against the suspension was more fraught with difficulties and they would certainly have taken much longer had not the quality of the liquid medium simplified the task somewhat, so that the next stage, the elimination of the red blood cells, was now imminent. With the concomitant curtailment of the tissue’s ability to resist liquid, the intercellular material gathered in loosely co-ordinated bands around the major veins, as a result of which the membranes of the blood cells became permeable, and the haemoglobin could begin to drain off. The red blood cells lost their colouring agents and these mingled with the irresistible fluid, colouring it, then seeped through the tissues, thus ensuring another significant victory for the ruthless forces of destruction. Behind the lines of this well-co-ordinated campaign, at the very moment of death, the internal enemies of the helpless, once miraculous, organism revolted and launched a simultaneous attack on both muscles and blood, overrunning any obstacle to their progress, such as carbohydrates, fats, and especially the once inimitably elegant mechanism of albumin, much in the manner of ‘a palace revolution’. The battalion consisted of so-called fermented cell-tissue, and the manoeuvre was of the type known as autodigestiopostmortales, but it left no doubt that this apparently objective selection of targets merely obscured the sad state of affairs, for it might have been more correct to regard it as ‘a below-stairs revolt’.