The Melancholy of Resistance

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 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—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’, since, in the last analysis, there was nothing more she herself wanted, as everything she desired — her feet rang down the floor of the hall—was hers already. She had recovered what had been taken from her and gained all she had hoped for, since power, indeed the supreme power, was in her hands, and her ‘crowning achievement’ had, she might say, as she entered the drawing room in a deeply moved state of mind, ‘literally’ fallen into her lap. Her thoughts were running on a little as they did in the office, or just because they tended to do so anyway, and especially in the last two weeks when they ran so repeatedly to the man she never stopped expecting day and night but who, unfortunately, had failed to ‘call round’. Sometimes she woke from a dream to the sound of a Jeep, at other times, and ever more frequently, chiefly at home in the drawing room, she had a sudden feeling … it couldn’t be and yet … she had to turn round because she felt that someone — it was he! — was standing behind her, which didn’t mean that she was anxious about his absence, simply that ‘life was empty without him …’—a feeling entirely understandable in one ‘whose heart was full of love’. She waited for him morning, noon and night, and in her imagination she saw him as she always did, commanding a tank as it careered along, dignified, not moving a muscle, then putting his eyes to the binoculars hanging round his neck and ‘scanning the far horizon’ … It was this heroic image that flashed before her now, but dissolved like smoke when she heard someone ‘shuffling around’ the hall again, someone across whom she had quite definitely ‘drawn the veil of the past’, but who, nine days after Valuska’s fate had been decided, went out every day at precisely eleven in the morning, returning at about eight at night, to deposit an appeal on his behalf. This was really the only evidence she had that Eszter was still alive, that is apart from the occasional flushing of the toilet, the dull distant sound of the piano that had been taken through into the servants’ room, and the bits of news she was sometimes given about him: otherwise, it was as if he wasn’t there, as if his little lair had nothing to do with the rest of the house. Altogether she had seen him once or twice that fortnight, chiefly on the day of ‘the historically significant repossession’ of the house, and since her security arrangements by which the servants’ room was inspected each evening had always reported the same thing — the opened scores, the works of Jane Austen piled into two columns, and the occupant, that is if he was in, either reading (‘The sheer bloody boredom of it!’) or playing the piano (‘Bloody romantics!’) — she had put an end to them the day before. It was not only that he no longer presented any kind of threat to her, but because she ‘had not the slightest shred of interest’ in either his doings or his existence, and on the rare occasions she did think of him she was forced to ask herself, ‘Was this the force you triumphed over?’ Over this dummy, this fool, this ‘creaking wreck’ who, through his loyalty to that half-wit, had reduced himself to a mere shadow! Because that’s all he was, thought Mrs Eszter as she heard him shuffle down the hall, a feeble shadow of even his former self, a pitiful geriatric, a terrified rabbit, ‘a trembling old ratbag, whose eyes are always watering’, who, instead of shaking off the shackles of the very memory of Valuska, had got himself so wrapped up in his ‘fatherly’ feelings that he had forfeited the utterly incomprehensible respect in which he had been held and was now suddenly regarded as ‘a subject of general ridicule’. From the morning on which Valuska’s fate had been so reassuringly decided, instead of shutting himself away as before, he dragged himself through town, in full sight of everyone twice every blessed day — once at eleven when he went out, once, at about eight, when he returned — in order to sit in the Yellow House with the completely silent Valuska in his stripy gown (apparently he couldn’t bring himself even to open his eyes now) and, so people said, talk to him or, like a real headcase, simply sit in silence himself. There was no sign at all that ‘this living monument to the most humiliating defeat’ would ever come to his senses, sighed Mrs Eszter as she heard the distant noise of the gate eventually being closed, since this, no doubt, was what they would go on doing as long as they lived, much to the amusement of this town at the threshold of a new age, sitting silently beside each other, gently holding hands; yes, that is how it would most probably be, she thought as she stood up and started arranging the room for ‘the interview’, though it didn’t matter to her either way, for what harm could this tiny blemish in her past do to her current position, here ‘at the pinnacle’, and in any case she could bear this twice-daily ‘quiet, funereal procession’ down the hall, at least until she could find ‘an opportune moment’ to arrange a long-overdue quick divorce. She pulled the table and chair closer to the window so the ‘candidate’ should have no opportunity of ‘clutching at anything for support’ in the room, which was pretty bare in any case, and when, after a good minute (‘You’re late!’ Mrs Eszter frowned), Harrer appeared escorting the ‘soldier-to-be’, ushering him to the centre of the room, the latter, who had arrived confidently, with his chest puffed out, quickly, and according to plan, softened under pressure. He’s as strong as a bull, thought the secretary as she appraised him from behind the table, while, under the combined pressure of Harrer’s first, appropriately intimidating, questions and the ‘vulnerability’ of standing in the centre of the room, this ‘native of the Nile’, who was ‘stinking of booze’, gave up any appearance of ‘self-confidence’, at which point the woman in command of the situation took over and let it be known ‘by way of a little warning’ that this was no place for playing ‘pig-in-a-poke’ and that they wouldn’t waste time on ‘pub-crawlers’, and that he should listen very carefully to what she said as she would say it only once. Let there be no misunderstanding, she announced, her face as cold as ice, ‘the purpose of our interrogation is to decide whether we should throw you to the authorities straight away or whether we have any use for you’, but that the only way he could persuade them to the latter opinion was by giving a fully detailed and entirely accurate account of the events of ‘that’ night. That was the only way, she raised her index finger, since accuracy and copiousness of detail were ‘an earnest of his intention’ to become a useful member of society, otherwise he could go before the judge, which meant prison, and in cases such as his, this meant for life. He had absolutely no desire to go to prison, the interrogated man answered uneasily, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, especially as Vulture — he pointed to Harrer — had promised him there would be no problems provided that he ‘dished the dirt’. He hadn’t come to give himself up, ‘he wasn’t born yesterday’, there was no need for threats, he had come of his own free will to confess everything and would take them through events line by line, because, he said, as he scratched at a healing bruise on his chin, ‘he knew the score’; they wanted policemen, and he was here because he was fed up with the Nile. We’ll see what we can do, Mrs Eszter replied with a severe dignity, but first they wanted to hear whether he had committed any crime so serious that ‘not God himself could save you from the full force of the law’, and that once he had told them everything, ‘word by word, line by line’ then, and only then, would she, the secretary to the council, be able to tell whether she was in a position to help.

Yes, ma’am [the man cleared his throat], it made a big enough stink, you could smell it a mile away, I should say. But we weren’t no part of it, not till we heard in the Nile that there was a bit of a ruckus in town, so I say to the others, to Gyömrö and Feri Holger, right fellas, your country needs you, we’ll soon knock some sense into them. ‘Cause we’re known, ma’am [madam secretary, Harrer corrected him], I mean madam secretary, as the heavy brigade, because, to be honest with you, the three of us, how should I put it … well, you know, when we get bored we go and sort a few things out and people are a bit scared of us, I mean they avoid us like the plague, ‘cause whenever we look up from our beers the place goes quiet, if you know what I mean. No, but all this was small shit compared to what was going on when we got to the High Street, just where it meets the main road, and I told Gyömrö, come on, man, get a move on, ‘cause I’m not joking, this lot will leave nothing for us to do, and so, no point denying it, we got stuck in too. But then there was a big flair up because just as we’d started beating up a few guys, we saw this was another kind of stunt altogether, this lot are picking on civilians, so I say to Feri Holger, coffee-break guys, and he carefully lays two patients down, comes over and Gyömrö too, and we put our heads together and work out what we should do. But there’s a great crowd there by this time, all come down from the market square like the Russian army or something, so I say, OK, fellows, it looks like revolution, time to get out of here. But Gyömrö, he says, as far as he can remember the shops used to open up at such times, and the poor could help themselves, so we should go and see, ‘cause, I mean, there’s this little grocer’s nearby, full of excellent booze, let’s go see if it’s open today, then we can take off. Well, it really was open, but it wasn’t us that smashed the locks in, madam secretary, the door was in godamned splinters when we arrived, we just went in ‘cause it was open and tried to save a few bottles, but the guys before us had made such a job of it, we couldn’t find a single one that hadn’t been broken. We got a bit annoyed at that ‘cause we thought it wasn’t right, I mean here we were, all this godamned liberty and freedom for everyone, scratching around the place, dry as a bone, and I’m telling you, I swear by my dear mother [he put his hand on his heart], we didn’t want nothing, just a sip or two, then off home, ‘cause me, I like a bit of a fight, I put myself out a bit, if you see what I mean, but we had nothing to do with what was going on then, and generally I like things quiet, and that’s why I think I’d make a good policeman, and you, Vulture, you hold your trap [he addressed the clucking Harrer], you got enough to answer for … Anyway, off we go, we look at the club — nothing; we call in at the bar in the High Street — that’s smashed up too, so we think to ourselves, not much glory here, fellows, let’s try further out. So we go to whatsitsname, the Cowherd, but then Feri Holger perks up and say he knows somewhere down Friars’ Walk, one of those soda shops, and there, I got to be honest with you, we did break the door down. We didn’t do nothing, just looked in the store at the back and found a few foreign liqueur things, and we looked at the labels, and they seemed all right. I know, I know [he nodded at Mrs Eszter], I’m coming to the point, ‘cause this was the thing, you see, that led to real trouble, ‘cause we weren’t used to that foreign stuff and God, we felt so weird after we drunk it, I swore then I’d never touch another drop of it. ’Cause soon after that a bunch of the guys turn up with iron bars and they start smashing everything up, and I say to one, gimme one of those, what I mean to say is I admit it, we joined in pretty much. But don’t you start thinking I’m usually like that, madam secretary; it was that fucking booze did me head in, and even then, looking back on it, I don’t think we did too much damage, a mirror and a few glasses on the bar as I remember, nothing to merit a real beating … I told you to keep your trap shut, Vulture [he silenced Harrer once again], I’ll pay the cost of that mirror or whatever, if it’s going to be such a big thing to the fucking owner. I dunno what they fucking put into that fucking booze (pardon my language), but I was out for hours, I didn’t know where I was or what was what, then suddenly I see I’m sitting on the pavement, in front of the Komló, and the cold is killing me. I look around and I see the cinema is burning and the flames are already so high [he gestured upwards] and I say to myself, things are getting a bit serious here. I dunno how I got there or where the hell Gyömrö or Feri Holger have sauntered off to, I mean I couldn’t tell you if you was to torture me, I just mingled with the other lads, I simply didn’t click [the candidate reddened in fury] what the fuck was happening!! I felt godamned awful, I tell you, I stood there, my stomach and liver burning up, with the burning cinema there in front of me, and to be honest, I really believed, like a fucking idiot, that it was me that set it alight, ‘cause, God help me, I couldn’t remember a thing, I’d no idea what I’d been up to, I just stared at the flames thinking: was it me? or wasn’t it? and I really had no idea what to do. ‘Cause I couldn’t go till I was sure, and I didn’t know whether it was or wasn’t me that done it, I mean I know now, but then I didn’t, so eventually I say to myself, this is it, you really had better get out of here now … So I go through the German Quarter, lots of little streets, God knows what, so that I shouldn’t meet the people I just left all over again, and I stop for a breather by the gates of the cemetery, leaning up against the bars like this [he showed them], and suddenly there’s someone talking behind me. Well, fuck me, pardon my language, they’ve come for me too, I don’t usually run like a scared rabbit, you can see that by looking at me, madam secretary, but I got so scared, someone speaking to me in the silence like that. ‘Course, it was only one of the guys from the fight who knew it was time to blow, and he says, let’s change coats and I’ll go down the street and you go up it, that way we’ll throw them off, so I say, fine, let’s swap. But there was something about the guy that started bothering me, so I say to him, listen! I wouldn’t like it if this coat meant trouble, know what I mean, ‘cause don’t think for a second I’m gonna answer for what you done! A cheap shit, he was, I mean it was just a grey cloth coat but God knows what he did while it was on him, so I say, I’ve changed my mind, find someone else to swap with and let’s drop the subject. I didn’t see a thing he was so lightning fast, the fucker, and I trusted him, thinking he really was a pal. He stabbed me just under my shoulder blade, here [he unbuttoned his shirt and showed the place], though you can bet your sweet life, madam secretary, it was the heart he was after. But he did me, the shit, I was flat on the street, and by the time I woke up, the wound was hurting like hell, and the cold was killing me again. No wonder and all, ‘cause I had no coat on me, it was gone with everything that was in it — ID, cash, keys — and the fucking grey cloth coat lying there beside me on the ground, so what, in God’s name I ask you, could I do, I put it on, then full speed into the cemetery. ’Cause I was sure the guy had done something pretty heavy and I wasn’t so stupid as to be caught on account of a coat, but I had to put something on or I’d have frozen stiff in that cold, and I thought I was best going through the cemetery. I didn’t dare go home on account of the cinema, I didn’t have an ounce of sense left in me ‘cause of that, and what with the wound and the blood and the pain, you understand, I didn’t have no strength to make it out of town, so, in a word, I stayed there. I found an open crypt, respect due and all that, gathered a bit of wood at the end of the cemetery, and made a fire best as I could, staunching the blood with my vest, and waited for night. I could have bled to death there, madam secretary, but I’ve got a good constitution, so I could hold out that long, and then eventually, I snuck home, and seeing as I didn’t have the key I had to wake the old woman to let me in, and soon as I shut the door behind me, what with no ID, no cash, no nothing, I burned the fucking coat to a cinder. Then fetch the doctor, on the double, there’s one nearby, get bandaged up, take some pills, three days on me back then … well … I dunno, madam secretary, that’s all there is to it, I’ve left nothing out, that’s all I done wrong apart from a few fights in the past … I dunno how you see it, I mean whether, what with my record, I could still be a policeman, but when Vulture came round to see if I felt like volunteering, provided I told you everything dead straight, I thought … yeah, I’ll volunteer … ‘cause, me, I think I could be a useful member of society, though I dunno what you think about this couple of mistakes I made, I mean, well …

… well, Mrs Eszter shook her head for some time, humming to herself and staring sternly at the table, and eventually said, yes, yes … pursed her lips, continued humming, then, finally, drummed a brisk little tattoo on the table with her fingers, looked the candidate — who seemed at the point of collapse — up and down a few times, and then, by way of conclusion, mumbled, almost to herself, ‘I’d like to see the man who can sweep this under the carpet,’ then looked as though she was ready to administer the coup de grâce. The problem, she confessed to Harrer, over the head of the candidate so to speak, was far more serious than she had been led to believe, for, ‘after all’, she was seeking men of unimpeachable character, and though one might describe the present candidate as a troublemaker, loiterer, burglar, desecrator of graves, in fact as many things, it wouldn’t occur to anyone to describe him as — and here she flashed a smile at Harrer alone — precisely unimpeachable. She, for her part, would not wish to cast doubts on his sincerity, but, she sighed, still keeping her eyes on Harrer, there really was ‘precious little’ here to work on, so she didn’t know whether, in all conscience, she could assume responsibility for him, but if she did, that is after consultation with ‘an appropriate specialist’, she could be pretty certain that the best she could offer was a ‘maximum probationary period’. ‘Probationary …?’ the would-be officer of the law swallowed and looked to Harrer for some explanation as to what that might entail, or if nothing else for a simple dictionary definition of the word, but the latter was not about to embark on any kind of exposition for at this point the secretary glanced at her watch and gave a brief right-handed wave to her right-hand man to signal that he should ‘clear the room’ since she had to leave very soon. Harrer dragged the confused and terrified recruit through the door (you could hear him being admonished in the hall: ‘Don’t you understand? She’s taken you on, stop struggling, you lunk!’), while Mrs Eszter stood up, folded her arms under her breasts and, following her new habit, looked out of the window ‘to take stock of the world’, thinking to herself that, well, this was only a first step, but ‘at least we’re heading in the right direction with big lunks like him’, it was part of planning for the future, the foundations on which she would build and succeed, for by the time they had appointed a new chief (she waved to the chauffeur waiting by the car), he would be greeted by a competent, indeed potent force, heavily staffed by people who were eternally obliged to the secretary. Those were the stakes, she reflected, as she donned her leather coat and clicked the steel press-studs into place one after another: these were necessary precautions, carefully considered and, above all, soberly thought out, precautions that ‘wouldn’t collapse like silly little daydreams but were built on what lay solidly to hand’. For indeed, what else mattered — she checked her handbag again — but fitness for the job, and the most important thing was never to ‘yield’ to illusions, such as ‘people meant well or that there was a benevolent God or some kind of force for good in charge of human affairs’, which were generally clap-trap and lies of the most lethal sort (she stepped out into the hall) that she, for one, was ‘not prepared to swallow’; and as for ‘beauty’, ‘fellow feeling’ and ‘the good inside us all’, please! she puffed out her cheeks at the mention of each one, or even if she wanted to wax particularly lyrical, the best she could say was that society was (she passed through the gate) ‘a foul marsh of petty self-interest’. A marsh, she pulled a face and occupied the forward rear seat of the black Volga: a marsh where the wind bent the reeds, the wind, in this case, being her; and so she waited for Harrer to get in the front door, and, once he did so, said simply, ‘Let’s go!’ then leaned back comfortably in the yellow mock-leather padded seat and watched the houses as they swept by. She watched the houses, though now that most people capable of walking had made their way to the cemetery there were only a few industrious citizens in the street, and, as always when she sat in the car at that point of ‘mobile command’, full of the inimitable magic sensation of ‘sweeping by’, she could see with maximum clarity — like some landowner driving about his estate — that this really was all hers, potentially hers, for the plans to make it hers were in place, and until then, she smiled through the window of the Volga, ‘you can work all you like with your wheelbarrows and pickaxes, because we’ll soon make a start on your souls …’ Even Harrer did not know that the TIDY YARD … epithet represented only the first stage of the movement, and that the ORDERLY HOUSE part — and here the car turned from St Stephen’s Road into the Central Cemetery — was something that would follow only after the streets and gardens were tidy and ‘you could eat off those pavements’, when the committee for competition would make a complete tour of every house and she would hand out numerous prizes of her own (prizes that would outstrip those of the ORDERLY HOUSE committee) for ‘the simplest and most functional lifestyle’. But we mustn’t run ahead of ourselves, Mrs Eszter admonished herself, we must concentrate on what lies immediately before us — the burial, for example, she thought as she sat in the Volga and took stock of the vast crowd gathered before the catafalque, so that there should be no hitches on this highly significant occasion when ‘everything should go like clockwork’, since this was her first opportunity to address the crowd who longed for renewal and for congress with its leader, this, this would mark her first ‘proper’ public appearance, the first chance she had of proclaiming their ‘unity’. Now we’ll see whether we are worthy of people’s confidence, she cautioned Harrer, then stepped from the car and, with her customary decisive stride, set out for the catafalque through the crowd that immediately opened before her, then, having reached it, positioned herself at the head of the coffin, tapped the microphone a couple of times to make sure it was working, and, as a last gesture, sternly surveyed the scene before reassuring herself that her right-hand man had made a thoroughly competent job of the funeral arrangements. The orders she had given three days ago stipulated that the funeral service should express the spirit of the new age, which meant dispensing not only with the Church’s presence but with ‘all the usual saccharine appurtenances’; Harrer should junk all the ‘redundant trash’ and ‘give the whole a social character’, as indeed he had done; she nodded to the stage-struck producer in acknowledgement, surveying the unplaned coffin as it rested on a simple but well-polished butcher’s block beside a small open red box (its inscription, ‘For outstanding sporting progress’, hidden of course) which served to display the ‘posthumously awarded’ medal that marked the status of the departed, and, instead of the usual candelabra — a little startling perhaps but effective — two men who used to be Harrer’s assistants, who, for lack of time, had now been fitted out as hussars and carried two great plastic broadswords (borrowed from the local costume shop) in their firm hands, the purpose of which was graphically to remind the crowd of the reason they had gathered here, which was to bury an exemplary and heroic figure. She surveyed the coffin with Mrs Plauf inside it and, while the assembly quieted down and realized that things were ‘about to start’, contemplated the memory of her — she could say it now—‘pre-revolutionary’ visit. Who would have thought then, she asked herself, that just over a fortnight later this ‘little dumpling’ would, by her agency, be beatified as an exemplary hero; who would have thought that night when she left the suffocatingly cosy flat in such a temper that just sixteen days later such an idea might even occur to her, that she should be standing here by the coffin, no longer angry, on the contrary — no point denying it — when she recalled the figure of Mrs Plauf and her idiotic ways, she really felt rather sorry for her. Though whatever happened to her, she meditated on the catafalque, was chiefly her own fault for not being able to bear the disgrace, as her neighbour described it, and setting out to drag her son through the street by his hair after dark, setting out at that time simply, as luck would have it, to bump into some brigand who was just in the process of disguising himself, and who — according to the witnesses cowering behind their curtains in Karácsony János Street—‘dedicated’ five minutes of his precious time to ‘amusing himself with her’ in the lowest way possible before ‘silencing’ her. It was a personal tragedy, she decided with a sad face, tough luck, a truly tragic turn of events at the end of a ‘sheltered life’, since she, after all, was the last person to deserve such a fate, not having laid herself open to it, but at least, she reflected as she took leave of her, she is getting a hero’s send-off, and at this point she snapped open her handbag, took out the typed copy of the speech, and, seeing that she had everyone’s complete attention, took a deep breath. But just as she was doing so, owing to some muddle over the arrangements, four more hussars appeared from behind her back and, before she could interrupt them, took two planks cut to size, slipped them under the coffin, raised it and, following their instructions, started off with it in the direction of the crowd of mourners, who, having grown accustomed to unusual procedures, immediately and without any question, made way for them. She cast a withering glance at the deeply flushed Harrer, who stood as if rooted to the spot, but it was no use: if this was the way things were then there was nothing to be done but set off after the four hussars, who were cleaving their way through the startled crowd towards the freshly prepared grave with enormous gusto, clearly delighted that it should have been they, the physically strong, to whom Mrs Plauf was lighter than a feather, who had been chosen for this momentous task. It wasn’t only the speaker who was obliged to keep step with them, but, if they did not wish to be left behind, the whole assembly too, and, what was more, in order to maintain a modicum of dignity, everyone had somehow to disguise the fact that they were ‘practically running’—though this proved to be the least of their troubles, for the real problem was with the coffin itself, the hussars, despite numerous low whistles and whispered warnings, jauntily continued swishing along, oblivious of the fact that it too was tossing and bouncing in a jaunty, though rather more dangerous, fashion. Gasping and choking, they arrived at the grave with commendable dignity in the circumstances, and ‘it would be no understatement to say’ that everyone was much relieved to see that the coffin was still intact, and if nothing else, the strangeness of this ‘last journey’, accompanied by continuous whispering, had engendered a real fellow feeling among them, ready as they were to take their last farewells, so that everybody there was wholly intent on Mrs Eszter as she finally launched into her speech, holding two fluttering sheets of paper in her hand.

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’. Treacherous servants, these were, who even when the organism still buzzed with life had to be kept in check by the deployment of an entire inhibitor system, for their activities, which were supposed to be confined to the breaking down and preparation of material in the granaries of the empire, might well exceed the bounds of their appointed task and they might start to attack the very organism they were supposed to serve, so it required permanent and extreme vigilance on behalf of the inhibitors to keep them down. To give but an example, the proteolytic enzymes, the proteasics, had originally been given the task of catalysing the hydrolysis of the leukocytes, by breaking down the peptide bonds, and, it was only the forceful action of mucin that prevented them exterminating the albuminous matter along with the hydrochloric acid of the stomach. It was much the same with the carbohydrates and fats where the NADP and the coenzyme-A on the one hand and the lipase and dehydrogenized fatty acid on the other were obliged to remain in the custody of a troop of inhibitors, since without them nothing could have prevented the combined reductive enzymes escaping. By now there was nothing to slow them down, no resistance, so, with the onset of favourable temperatures the ‘palace revolution’ had already broken out, or rather continued, and the blood in the veins of the stomach’s mucous membrane that had turned to haematinic acid had dissolved parts of the stomach wall, so the battalion, composed chiefly of hydrochloric acid and pepsin, could launch an attack against the allies of the abdominal cavity. As a result of the endeavours of the enslaved enzymatic unit the glycogen in the liver decomposed into its simple elements and this was followed by the autolysis of the pancreas, the term autolysis throwing a pitiless light on the truth it hides, which is that from the moment of birth every living organism carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. Though the greatest part of the work could proceed only slowly, no doubt because of the relatively low supply of oxygen, putrefaction galloped on apace, that is to say the nitrogenous compounds including the micro-organisms entrusted with the breaking down of albumin completed their task, which micro-organisms, soon reinforced by the front-line troops, then began their operation among the intestines that harboured them in enormous numbers, so that from there they might be able to extend their control over the whole realm. Apart from a few anaerobic microbes, the batteries consisted chiefly of aerobic putrefactors, but it would be almost impossible to list the various units that comprised them, since, beside the various bacteria, including proteus vulgaris, subtilis mesentericus, pyocyaneous, sarcina flava and streptococcus pyogenes, a vast amount of other micro-organisms took part in the decisive battle, the earliest clash of which took place in the blood vessels beneath the skin, then in the walls of the stomach and the groin and later between the ribs and in the canals above and below the collar-bone, where the hydrogen sulphide produced by the process of putrefaction combined with the haemoglobin in the blood to produce, on the one hand, verdoglobin and, combined with the iron contained in blood colouring, ferrous sulphate on the other, in order that these might then invade the muscles and internal organs. Once again, thanks to the forces of resistance, bodily fluids containing the blood colouring continued to penetrate the steadily decomposing tissue, and the slow exodus of basic building materials persisted until they reached the surface of the skin at which point they began streaming away into the deep. Running parallel to the unfolding heterolysis were the exploits of an anaerobic micro-organism called clostridium perfringens, a highly effective bacterium which rapidly bred in the intestine, launched its external operations in the stomach and the veins but quickly spread through the entire system, producing blisters in the chambers of the heart, under the integument of the lungs, and made a substantial contribution to incipient blisters forming on the putrefying skin which eventually peeled off. The once invulnerable realm of proteins, so complicated at first appearance yet so logical in its workings, had quite collapsed by now, the albumose peptones first, followed by the amido group, nitrogenous and non-nitrogenous aromatic matter, and finally the organic fatty acids: from them were created various acids including formic, vinegar, butter, valerian, palmitin and stearin and certain inorganic end-products, such as hydrogen, nitrogen and water. With the help of nitrites and nitrate-bacteria, the ammonia in the soil, oxidized to nitrous acid, which, in the form of salts, crept up the narrow roots of plants to return to the world from which they had come. Some of the decomposed carbohydrates melted into the air as carbon dioxide so that — theoretically at least — they might, for once in their lives, take part in the process of photosynthesis. So, through various delicate channels, a superior organism welcomed them, dividing them neatly between organic and inorganic forms of being, and when, after a long and stiff resistance, the remaining tissue, cartilage and finally the bone gave up the hopeless struggle, nothing remained and yet not one atom had been lost. Everything was there, it is simply that there was no clerk capable of making an inventory of all the constituents; but the realm that existed once — once and once only — had disappeared for ever, ground into infinitesimal pieces by the endless momentum of chaos within which crystals of order survived, the chaos that consisted of an indifferent and unstoppable traffic between things. It ground the empire into carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur, it took its delicate fibres and unstitched them till they were dispersed and had ceased to exist, because they had been consumed by the force of some incomprehensibly distant edict, which must also consume this book, here, now, at the full stop, after the last word.