Satantango (24 page)

all at once
all he could do was sit in the cold sharp light, his brain positively hurting with the confusion inside him . . . He carefully grasped the pencil, pulled out the SCHMIDT file from among the rest, opened it on the appropriate page, and uncertainly, like a man with good reason to fear
the serious consequences of his actions
, wrote the following sentence: “He is sitting with his back to the window, his body casting a pale shadow on the floor.” He gave a great gulp, put down the pencil and, with trembling hands, mixed himself another
pálinka,
spilled half of it and downed the rest. “He has a red saucepan in his lap, containing spuds in paprika. He isn’t eating. He isn’t hungry. He needs a piss so stands up, skirts the kitchen table, goes out to the yard and through the back door. He comes back. Sits down. Mrs. Schmidt asks him something? He doesn’t answer. Using his feet, he pushes away the saucepan he had put down on the floor. He’s not hungry.” The doctor’s hands were still trembling as he lit a cigarette. He wiped his perspiring brow then made airplane motions with his arms to let his armpits breathe. He adjusts the blankets across his shoulders and leaned over the journal again. “Either I’ve gone mad or, by God’s mercy, this morning I have discovered that I am the wielder of mesmerizing power. I find I can control the flow of events around me using nothing more than words. Not that I have the least idea yet what to do. Or I have gone mad . . .” He lost confidence at this point. “It’s all in my imagination,” he grumbled to himself, then tried another experiment. He pulled out the notebook headed KRÁNER. He found the last entry and feverishly began to write again. “He is lying on his bed, fully clothed. His boots hang off the end of the bed because he doesn’t want to muddy the bedding. It’s stifling hot in the room. Out in the kitchen Mrs. Kráner is clattering dishes. Kráner calls her through the open door. Mrs. Kráner says something. Kráner angrily turns his back to the door and buries his head in the pillow. He is trying to sleep and closes his eyes. He is asleep.” The doctor gave a nervous sigh, mixed another drink, and anxiously looked round the room. Scared, touched by an occasional doubt, he once again resolved: “There can be no doubt about the fact that by focused conceptualizing I can, to some degree, decide what should happen on the estate. Because only that which has been conceptualized can happen. It’s just that, at this stage, of course, it is an utter mystery to me what I should make happen, because . . .” At that moment the “bells” began to ring again. He only had time enough to decide he had not misheard last evening, he really did hear “sounds’, but he had no opportunity to consider where the clanging noises were coming from because no sooner had they reached him they were were absorbed in the permanent hum of silence and once the last bell died away he felt such emptiness in his soul he felt he had lost something of deep value. What he thought he heard in these curious distant sounds was “the lost melody of hope’, a kind of objectless encouragement, the perfectly incomprehensible words of a vital message, of which the only part he understood was that “it means something good, and offers some direction to my, as yet unresolved, power.” . . . He put an end to his feverish jottings, quickly put his coat on and stuffed cigarettes and matches into his pocket because he now felt it more important than ever to seek out, or at least try to seek out, the source of that distant ringing. The fresh air dizzied him at first: he rubbed his burning eyes, then — not to rouse the least attention of the neighbors at their windows — left by the gate leading to the back garden and, as far as possible, tried to hurry. Reaching the mill, he stopped dead for a moment because he had no idea whether he was heading in the right direction. He stepped through the enormous gates of the mill and heard yelping sounds from one of the upper stories. “The Horgos girls.” He turned and left. He looked round not knowing where to go and what to do. Should he skirt the estate and set out toward the Szikes? . . . Or should he go by the metalled road that led to the bar. Or maybe it was worth trying the road to Almássy Manor? Maybe he should just stay here in front of the mill in case “the bells” started again He lit a cigarette, cleared his throat, and because he really couldn’t make up his mind one way or the other he nervously stamped his feet. He looked at the enormous acacias that surrounded the mill, shivered in the sharp wind, and wondered if it wasn’t a stupid idea going out just like that, on the spur of the moment, whether he hadn’t acted too precipitately, since, after all, a whole night had separated the two peals of bells. So why should expect another so soon . . . He was about to turn around and go home where there were warm blankets waiting for him until the next time, when, just at that moment, “the bells” started ringing again. He hurried over to the open space in front of the mill and by doing so managed to solve one mystery: “the bell sounds” seemed to be coming from the other side of the metalled road (‘It could be the Hochmeiss estate! . . . ’) and it wasn’t simply that he could now work out the direction but that he was now convinced the bells represented a call to action, or at least an encouragement, a promise; that they were not merely the products of a sick imagination, or a delusion produced by a sudden rush of emotion . . . Enthusiastically, he set out for the metalled road, crossed it and, taking no notice of mud or puddles, made his way toward the Hochmeiss estate, his heart “buzzing with hope, expectation and confidence . . . He felt “the bells” were compensation for the miseries of his entire life, for all fate had inflicted on him, that they were a fitting reward for stubborn survival . . . Once he succeeded in fully understanding the bells, everything would go well: with this power in his hands he would be able to lend a new, as yet unknown momentum “to human affairs.” And so he felt an almost childish joy when, at the far end of the Hochmeiss estate, he glimpsed the little ruined chapel, and while he didn’t know whether the chapel — it had been destroyed in the last war and had never shown the least sign of life since then — contained a “bell’, or indeed anything else, he didn’t think it beyond imagination that it might . . . After all no one had been down this way for years, except perhaps some simple-minded tramp needing shelter for the night . . . He stopped by the main door of the chapel and tried to open it but however he wrenched and struggled, using his whole body weight, it wouldn’t budge, so he skirted the building, found a small rotted side door in the crumbling wall, gave it a little push and it creaked open. He ducked and stepped in: cobwebs, dust, dirt, stench and darkness. There wasn’t much left of the pews, only a few broken pieces, which was more than could be said of the altar which lay shattered everywhere. Weeds were growing over the gaps in the brickwork. Thinking he heard a hoarse gasping from the corner by the front door, he twisted around, moved closer and found himself confronting a huddled figure, an infinitely aged, tiny, wrinkled creature lying on the ground, his knees to his chin, shaking with fear. Even in the dark he could see the light of his terrified eyes. Once the creature saw he’d been discovered he moaned in despair and scrambled over to the far corner to escape. “Who are you?” the doctor asked in a firm voice, having overcome his momentary fright. The shrunken figure didn’t answer, but drew further back into his corner, ready to spring. “Do you understand what I’m asking?!” the doctor demanded, a little louder. “Who the hell are you?!” The creature muttered something incomprehensible, raised his hands in front of him by way of defense, then burst into tears. The doctor grew angry. “What are you doing here? Are you a tramp?” When the homunculus failed to answer and just continued whimpering, the doctor lost his temper. “Is there a bell here?” he shouted. The tiny old man leapt to his feet in fright, instantly stopped crying, and waved his arms about. “El! . . . el!” he piped and waved to the doctor to follow him. He opened a tiny door in a niche beside the main portal and pointed upward. “El! . . . el!” “Good God,” muttered the doctor. “A lunatic! Where have you escaped from, you halfwit!” The creature went on up the stairs leaving the doctor a few steps further back, trying to climb up by the wall in case the rotted, dangerously creaking stairs collapsed beneath him. When they reached the small belltower of which only one brick wall remained, the rest having been brought down ages ago either by the wind or a bomb, the doctor immediately woke as if from “hours of a sickly, nonsensical trance.” A quite small bell was hanging in the middle of the exposed, improvised structure, suspended from a beam, one end of which was propped on top of the brick wall, the other on top of the newel post. “How did you manage to raise the beam?” the doctor asked. The old man stared hard at him a moment than stepped over to the bell. “Uh — ur — ah — co-i! Uh — ur — ah — co-i!” he screeched, grabbed an iron bar and started ringing the bell in terror. The doctor had gone pale and was leaning against the wall of the stairs for support. He shouted at the man who was still feverishly striking the bells “Stop it! Stop it at once!” But this only made things worse. “Uh — urk — ah — co-i! Uh — urk — ah — co-i! Uh — urk — ah — o-i!” he kept screaming, hitting the bell ever harder. “The Turks are coming?! Coming up your mother’s ass, you fool!” the doctor yelled back, then gathering up his strength, climbed down the tower, hurried from the chapel, and tried to put as much distance between himself and the madman — anything not to hear the terrifying screech that seemed to follow him like a cracked trumpet all the way back to the metalled road. It was growing towards dusk by the time he got home and he assumed his position by the window again. It took some time, several minutes in fact, to regain his composure, for his hands to stop trembling enough for him to be able to lift the demijohn, mix himself a drink and light a cigarette. He downed the
pálinka
then picked up his journal and tried to capture in words all he had just suffered. He stared at the paper then wrote: “An unforgivable error. I took a common bell for the Great Bells of Heaven. A filthy tramp! A madman on the run from the asylum. I’m an idiot!” He covered himself with his blankets, leaned back in the chair, and looked out over the field. The rain was quietly pattering. His composure was back now. He went over the events of the erly afternoon, over his “moment of enlightenment” then pulled out the notebook headed MRS. HALICS. He opened it on the page where the notes ended and started writing. “She is sitting in the kitchen. The Bible is in front of her and she is quietly muttering some text. She looks up. She is hugry. She goes to the pantry and returns with bacon, sausage and bread. She starts to chomp her way through the meat and takes a bite of the bread. Occasionally she turns the pages of the Bible.” Writing this down had a calming effect, but, when he leafed back to what he had written earlier about SCHMIDT, KRÁNER and MRS. HALICS, he was disappointed to note that it was all wrong. He stood up and started walking about his room, stopping now and then to think, then moving again. He looked round the narrow limits of his home and his attention was caught by the door. “Damn it!” he groaned. He took a box of nails from under the wardrobe and, with a few nails in one hand and the hammer in the other, went over to the door and started beating in the nails with increasing fury. Having finished, he calmly returned to his chair, covered his back with the blankets, and mixed another drink, this time, after some consideration, in half-half proportion. He gazed and thought, then suddenly his eyes brightened and he took out a new notebook. “It was raining when . . . ,” he wrote, then shook his head and crossed it out. “It was raining when Futaki awoke, and . . . ,” he tried again, but decided this too was “poor stuff.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose, adjusted his glasses then propped his elbows on the table and put his head in his hands. He saw before him, as clear as if by magic, the path prepared for him, the way the fog swam up from either side of it and, in the middle of the narrow path, the luminous face of his future, its lineaments bearing the infernal marks of drowning. He reached for the pencil again and felt he was back on track now: there were enough notebooks, enough
pálinka,
his medication would last till spring at least and, unless the nails rotted in the door, no one would disturb him. Careful not to damage the paper, he started writing. “One morning near the end of October not long before the first drops of the mercilessly long autumn rains began to fall on the cracked and saline soil on the western side of the estate (later the stinking yellow sea of mud would render footpaths impassable and put the town too beyond reach) Futaki woke to hear bells. The closest possible source was a lonely chapel about four kilometers southwest on the old Hochmeiss estate but not only did that have no bell but the tower had collapsed during the war and it was too far to hear anything at that distance. And in any case they did not sound distant to him, these ringing-booming bells; their triumphal clangor was swept along by the wind and seemed to come from somewhere close by (‘It’s as if they were coming from the mill . . . ’). He propped himself on his elbows on the pillow so as to look out of the mouse-hole-sized kitchen window that was partly misted up, and directed his gaze to the faint blue dawn sky but the field was still and silent, bathed only in the, now ever fainter, bell sound, and the only light to be seen was the one glimmering in the doctor’s window whose house was set well apart from the others on the far side, and that was only because its occupant had for years been unable to sleep in the dark. Futaki held his breath because he wanted to know where the noise came from: he couldn’t afford to lose a single stray note of the rapidly fading clangor, however remote (‘You must be asleep, Futaki . . . ’). Despite his lameness he was well known for his light tread and he hobbled across the ice-cold stone floor of the kitchen, soundless as a cat, opened the widows and leaned out (‘Is no one awake? Can’t people hear it? Is nobody else around?’). A sharp damp gust hit him straight in the face so he had to close his eyes for a moment and, apart from the cockcrow, a distant bark, and the fierce howling of the wind that had sprung up just a few minutes earlier there was nothing to hear however hard he listened but the dull beating of his own heart, as if the whole thing had been merely a kind of game or ghostly half-dream (“ . . . It’s as if somebody out there wants to scare me’). He gazed sadly at the threatening sky, at the burned-out remnants of a locust-plagued summer, and suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia, as in a vision, the progress of spring, summer, fall and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude in the much greater spaces of eternity, a brilliant conjuring trick to produce something apparently orderly out of chaos, to establish a vantage point from which chance might begin to look like necessity . . . and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin, painfully trying to tear his body from it, only, eventually, to deliver himself — utterly naked, without identifying mark, stripped down to essentials — into the care of the people whose duty it was to wash the corpses, people obeying a order snapped out in the dry air against a background loud with torturers and flayers of skin, where he was obliged to regard the human condition without a trace of pity, without a single possibility of any way back to life, because by then he would know for certain that all his life he had been playing with cheaters who had had marked the cards and who would, in the end, strip him even of his last means of defense, of that hope of some day finding his way back home. He turned his head towards the east, once the home of a thriving industry, now nothing but a set of dilapidated and deserted buildings, watching while the first rays of a swollen red sun broke through the topmost beams of a derelict farmhouse from which the roof tiles had been stripped. “I really should come to a decision. I can’t stay here any longer.” He drew the warm duvet over him again and rested his head on his arm, but could not close his eyes; at first it had been the ghostly bells that had frightened him but now it was the threatening silence that followed: anything might happen now, he felt. But he did not move a muscle, not until the objects around him, that had so far been merely listening, started up a nervous conversation (the sideboard gave a creak, a saucepan rattled, a china plate slid back into the rack) at which point . . .”