Free Satantango by László Krasznahorkai Page A

hearing their awkwardly formulated questions and excuses so impatiently, muttering away the while, that they (particularly Mrs. Kráner) constantly bit off their sentences, quickly put away the money he had put out for them and hastened away without counting it. This more or less explained why he was so nervous about being anywhere near the door: it made him feel decidedly ill, gave him a headache or made him feel breathless every time he was obliged (due to some carelessness on their part) to get up out of the armchair and fetch something from the far end of the room, so that each time he did (only after a long preliminary struggle with himself) he strove to be through with it as quickly as possible, although, no matter how quickly he did it, by the time he got back to his chair his day had been ruined and he was seized by a mysterious bottomless anxiety, so the hand holding the pencil or the glass began to tremble and he filled his journal with nervous little jottings that, naturally, he scrubbed out with crude, furious movements. It was no wonder then that everything in this accursed corner of the estate was upside-down: the mud that had been trailed in had dried in thick layers on the wholly rotten, disintegrating floorboards; weeds grew by the wall nearest the door and, off to the right, lay a barely recognizable hat that had been trampled flat, surrounded by remnants of food, plastic bags, a few empty medicine bottles, bits of notepaper and worn-down pencils. The doctor — quite contrary, some believed, to his perhaps exaggerated and probably pathological love of order — did nothing to remedy this intolerable situation; he was convinced that his small corner of the estate was part of the hostile outside world and this was all the evidence he needed to justify his fear, anxiety, restlessness and uncertainty, for there was only a single “defensive wall” to protect him, the rest being “vulnerable.” The room opened on to a dark corridor where weeds grew, this being the way to the toilet whose cistern had not worked for years, its absence being remedied by a bucket that Mrs. Kráner was obliged to refill three days a week. At one end of the corridor were two doors with great rusty locks hanging from them; the other end led outside. Mrs. Kráner, who had her own keys to the place, could always smell the strong sour stench as soon as she entered: it got into her clothes and, as she always insisted, it settled in her skin as well so it was no use trying to wash it off, even washing twice, on the days when she was “visiting the doctor”: her efforts were pointless. That was the reason she gave Mrs. Halics and Mrs. Schmidt for the brief time she spent indoors: she was simply incapable of enduring the stench for more than two minutes at a time, because “I tell you, that smell is unbearable, simply unbearable, I don’t even know how it is possible to live with such a terrible smell. He is after all an educated man and can see . . .” The doctor ignored the unbearable smell as he did everything else that did not directly impinge on his observation post, and the more he ignored such things the more attention and expertise he devoted to maintaining the order around him — the food, the cutlery, the cigarettes, the matches and the book — all with the correct distance between them on the table, the windowsill, the area round the armchair and the fiercely aggressive rot on the already ruined floorboards, and at dusk he would feel a warm glow, a degree of contentment, on surveying the suddenly darkening room, recognizing that everything was under his firm, omnipotent control. He had been aware for months that there was no point in further experimentation but then he realized that, even if he wanted to, he was unable to make the slightest change to any of it; no modification could conclusively be proved better because he was afraid that in itself the desire for change was only a subtle sign of his failing memory. So,