To love order is to love life: love of order is therefore love of symmetry, and love of symmetry is a memory of eternal truth, he said after a long silence then seeing how she stared at him in amazement nodded at her by way of affirmation, then stood up, studied the ever more distant station as if inspecting it to see whether his pursuers were still there, then finally sat back down again, drew his coat about him and added by way of explanation: An hour or two, that’s all, just an hour or two now.
She didn’t understand what he was saying at first, nor could she guess what language he was speaking and it only became clearer to her, the woman explained a couple of days later after her husband had arrived at the vacation house they had rented in the Jura mountains, once they had both recovered, once the man took a piece of paper from his pocket and showed her what it said: Mario Merz, Schaffhausen, and imagine that, she said, quite excitedly, it had to be Merz who was a particularly close friend of hers too, though she was absolutely baffled as to what this was all about until it slowly dawned on her that the man wasn’t wanting to tell her something, wasn’t spinning some story or other, but was asking her where in Schaffhausen he might find Merz, and even this led to a misunderstanding, she said, quite a few amusing misunderstandings in fact, for the man thought that what he was looking for was something called Merz, and she held up both her hands and laughed now as she remembered the incident, because Merz himself, the man, she told him, was not to be found in Schaffhausen, but in Toronto because that was where Merz lived, she explained, and sometimes in New York so she couldn’t understand why someone had suggested Schaffhausen to him, but Korin just shook his head and insisted no Toronto, no New York, Schaffhausen, Merz in Schaffhausen, and for a long time he couldn’t think of the word he was looking for which was sculpture, sculpture in Schaffhausen, at which point the woman’s eyes suddenly lit up and O, she cried and laughed, What a fool! and shook her head, because of course there was a sculpture by Merz in Schaffhausen, in Schaffhausen’s Hallen für die neue Kunst, the museum, that’s where it was, not just one but two, and Korin cried out in delight, that’s it, the very thing, a museum, a museum and now it was all perfectly clear what he wanted, what he was looking for, where he was going and why, and he immediately told her the whole story, all in Hungarian alas, he spread his hands to apologize, since the English was beyond him and because they were on his trail and he couldn’t think of the right words, or rather only one or two came so there was nothing he could do for a while but say it all in Hungarian in case the woman managed to grasp something of it, relating the story of Kasser, Bengazza, Falke and Toót, describing them in great detail, how they appeared in Crete and in Britain, what happened in Rome and Cologne, and most naturally, how they had all grown to be so much a part of him that he could no longer part with them, because, just imagine, he told his traveling companion, he had been trying to leave them for days without success, and it was only today he properly understood, at the lake in Zürich, the Zürich Lake, and at the familiar words Zürich Lake the woman’s eyes lit up again, so Korin nodded, saying yes, there, there was where it became perfectly obvious that it couldn’t be done, he couldn’t just drop them like that, that he knew there was no way out, and so it was only today he realized he would have to take them there with him, there where he himself was going, to Schaffhausen in other words, and his face darkened and grew more serious; you mean to the Hallen für die neue Kunst, said the woman helping him out, and they both laughed.
Her name was Marie, said the woman sweetly bowing her head, she looked after him, tended him, defended and helped him, in other words she’d give her life for him, she said; and his name, Korin pointed to himself, was György, Gyuri; ah, in that case might you be Hungarian, guessed the woman and Korin nodded, saying yes, he Magyarország; and the other smiled and said she had heard something about the country but knew so little of it, so perhaps he might be able to tell her something about the Hungarians, because there was some time before they would reach Schaffhausen; and Korin asked, Magyarok?, and the woman nodded, yes, yes, to which he answered that Hungarians did not exist, Hungarian no exist, they had all died, they died out, the process having begun about a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago, he said, and though it might seem incredible the whole thing happened without anyone noticing; and the woman shook her head incredulously, Hungarian? No exist? and, yes, they died out, Korin insisted, the process beginning in the last century when there was a great confusion of peoples and not one Hungarian remained, only a mixture, a few Swabians, Gypsies, Slovaks, Austrians, Jews, Romanians, Croats and Serbs and so on, and chiefly combinations of all these, but Hungarians disappeared, they had all gone, Korin attempted to persuade her, only Hungary the place existed not the Hungarians, Hungary yes, Hungarians not, and not one genuine memorial remained to tell the world what an extraordinary, proud, irresistible nation they had been, because that’s what they were once, living according to laws that were both very fierce and very pure, a people kept awake only by the eternal necessity of performing great deeds, a barbaric people who slowly lost interest in a world that preferred lower horizons, and in this way they perished, degenerated, died out and interbred until nothing remained of them, only their language, their poetry, something little, something insignificantly small; and the woman wrinkled her brow and said, what do you mean; and he didn’t know, he said, but that was how it was, and the most interesting thing about it, not that it interested him at all, was that no one ever mentioned their degeneration and disappearance, nothing was said of the whole business, and that anything said now was a lie, an error, a misunderstanding or crass idiocy, but alas, the woman gestured, this was utterly confusing for her, so Korin left off and asked her instead to write down the precise name of the museum, then he fell silent, and only gazed at her, as her warm, sensitive eyes met his and she slowly started to tell him something trying to make him understand, but it was obvious that he didn’t understand because Korin’s mind was clearly elsewhere, that he was simply gazing at the woman’s friendly attractive face, and watching the lights of little stations as they came and went, one after another.