Free The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai

greater abandon, as if she were as light as a sparrow, and decided to her satisfaction that the irreversible process of ruin, schism and disintegration would continue according to its own infrangible rules, and that, day by day, the range of ‘whatever things’ were still capable of functioning or showing vigour was growing narrower; the way she saw it the very houses were dying by imperceptible degrees of neglect, obedient to the fate that was certain to overtake them: the bond between lodger and lodging was broken; stucco was dropping in great chunks, rotten window-frames had separated from walls and, on either side of the street, roof after roof showed signs of sagging, as if deliberately to demonstrate that something in the constitution of beams and rafters—and not just beams and rafters but stones, bones and earth itself—was in the process of losing cohesion; along the pavements the rubbish that no one felt like collecting and no one did collect was spreading ever more luxuriantly across the whole town, and the cats that haunted loose mounds of it, cats whose numbers seemed to have increased at an impossible rate and who more or less took over the streets at night, had grown so confident that when Mrs Eszter wanted to cut through a thick forest of them they hardly deigned to move out of even her way, and when they did it was slowly, insolently, at the last possible moment. She saw all this as she saw the rusty shutters on shops not opened for weeks, the drooping arms of unlit ornamental lampposts, the cars and buses abandoned on the street for lack of fuel … and suddenly a delightful tickling sensation ran all down her spine because this slow decay had, for her, long ceased to signify some terminal disillusion but was instead a harbinger of what would soon replace a world as ripe for ruin as this; not an end then but a beginning, something that would be founded ‘not on sickly lies but on the harsh merciless truth’, something that would place supreme emphasis on ‘fitness of body and a powerful and beautiful desire for the intoxicating realm of action’. Mistress of the future, she already had courage enough to look the town full in the eye, perfectly convinced that she was standing on the threshold of ‘sweeping changes leading to something new, something of infinite promise’, and it wasn’t only the usual every-day signs of collapse that confirmed her view, but a good many ordinary yet strange and, in their own way, not altogether unwelcome occurrences which hastened to prove that the unavoidable resurrection, despite the lack of ‘normal human resolve to enter the fray’, had been ordained by the mysterious and overwhelming forces of heaven itself. The day before yesterday the enormous water-tower at the back of the Göndölcs Gardens had begun—and continued for some minutes—to sway dangerously above the tiny houses surrounding it, a phenomenon which, in the opinion of the physics and math master of the local grammar school, a trustworthy member of the astronomical observation group whose telescope was positioned on top of the tower and who had interrupted many hours of solitary chess to run down breathless with excitement to proclaim the news, was ‘quite inexplicable’. Yesterday, the clock of the Catholic church in the main square, immobile for decades, startled everyone by beginning to strike (a sound which shot like electricity through Mrs Eszter!), a fact all the more extraordinary when you considered that of the four rusted parts of the mechanism, three, from which even the hands had been removed, leapt into simultaneous action, and continued, with ever shorter intervals between their dull ticking, to beat out passing time. It was no wonder then that, having ever since nightfall expected to come upon some other ‘ominous sign’, she was not surprised at what she saw when, arriving by the Hotel Komló at the corner of Hétvezér Square, she glanced up at the gigantic poplar which used